Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

bugzilla.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 443 posts

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#311

Post by Salgat »

b112 wrote: post #300
runnerup wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay the same amount for a Linux laptop that worked as easily as a MBP and had similar build quality, performance and battery life. Howver, whatever crazy-stable and easy to use and well supported hypothetical Linux this is wouldn’t be compatible with my “real” Linux use cases so I would then also install Arch or whatever and live with constantly borked everything and just swap between my Arch “Dev” OS and my…

Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years. Stable ?? Linux is a rock of stability, you must mean something else.

The kernel yes, the distros and userspace, not so much. Linux is my go to for hosting, but macOS and Windows are designed to prioritize for the desktop user experience.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#312

Post by dang »

Recent and related:

Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746 - April 2023 (215 comments)

Is the current post significant new information* or just a repeat of that submission?

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#313

Post by cassepipe »

chlorion wrote: post #251
arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

Gaming on a mid-tier modern GPU probably uses around 50-100w, the Steam stats probably have a number of users to multiply with. I'm sure it's a massive amount of power. I don't like video games and they are not-necessary so I propose that we ban them globally, or only allow gaming if using renewable energy. If you don't live in a place where this is an option, too bad! Maybe instead of this we require all games to be…

Now I will have to spend the rest of my life to try to forget that heated driveways are a thing and pretend everything is going to be fine

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#314

Post by Retric »

grawlinson wrote: post #307
duttonw wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only shows up when in 'dark mode'.

that is some amazingly crap UX. who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Ambient mode is a dark mode specific feature. If you don’t use dark mode then it’s not going to do anything.

Completely hiding it in normal mode isn’t the best choice, but it is somewhat understandable.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#315

Post by simondotau »

1attice wrote: post #305
JohnFen wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a bagel?

A bagel is a first-degree pretzel.

For those people unfamiliar with a pretzel, imagine eating something that is making you thirsty.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#316

Post by bscphil »

sicariusnoctis wrote: post #238
dan-robertson wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People care about open Firefox bugs much older than that. Basically any long-lived program will have ancient bugs that never made it onto someone’s todo list.

For example, it only took 20 years (!!) to stop Ctrl+Q from quitting Firefox on Linux. :) IIRC, a couple of patches did get submitted, but never accepted for unknown reasons.

Isn't Ctrl-Q quitting the program normal and expected behavior? For example, right now on Firefox 111, I can see in the File menu that the "Quit" option has the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Q. I'm fairly sure it works.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#317

Post by simondotau »

toenailtag wrote: post #224
somid3 wrote: post #187

Conspiracy theory — could this have been done on purpose for browser share dominance purposes?

I would bet it is more likely that MS devs noticed but just didn't care. The farthest it would have gotten in conversation with QA triage would have been "does this issue affect any of our services? Ok then that is Mozilla's problem."

MS?

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#318

Post by 908B64B197 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #146
LeoPanthera wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome. Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.

>Safari is significantly more efficient. Based on the increased laptop battery life I notice, so is using Edge on Windows. It makes sense that both Apple and Microsoft can extract the best out of their OS + browser. There's no way Firefox can compete on such OS specific optimizations.

> so is using Edge on Windows.

The new Edge based on Chromium performs better than Chrome with regards to power consumptions.

The old Edge was even better in terms of power consumption. Like a few extra hours of battery life.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#319

Post by genocidicbunny »

einpoklum wrote: post #194
sseagull wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the waste caused by people throwing away devices that are "too slow", and the resources required to build new computers/phones. Somewhere I saw a rough figure about phones. Something like: if everyone was able to keep their phone one year longer, it would be the equivalent of 600,000 cars off the road or something. (Just looked it up - source is possibly the founder of iFixit). But you know, development…

Actually, in the PC/laptop space, I believe this phenomenon has been waning somewhat over the past... oh, the better part of a decade. This is a result of: * Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing * The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing. * Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and…

I would say we're coming to that point with phones too. Phones have also largely reached the end of their breakneck big-annual-improvement phase; There's little annual improvement in performance, power consumption, form factor or feature set. Screen resolutions are plenty high for most users, similar for the cameras. Most people would also probably be quite happy with the version of Android or iOS they are using if it kept getting bugfixes and security updates.

Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

#320

Post by rahmeero »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #225
tyingq wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe compare manifest v2 friendly Firefox with uBlock Origin vs eventual Chrome without it :)

Serious savings indeed when the Javascript cryptominer some ad network blithely serves up is ad-blocker'd, but we prefer synthetic benchmarks . In seriousness, though, this is an issue. Elsewhere, I observe arguments about eg userbenchmark rankings, and the comparative relevance of single-core vs multicore performance. Are you playing a game, or rendering video 24/7 -- or running some entirely synthetic workload that…

Not sure if this is related, but Chrome on my Macbook regularly gets to a state where one process (a tab?) is consuming 4 Gb RAM and 20%+ CPU. This happens on both M1 and Intel CPUs, on multiple releases of OS.

Situation seems to happen some time after visiting ad-heavy sites (yeah I know I should install an ad-blocker). Have others noticed this? Seems to be Chrome. I also use Firefox and occasionally Safari but have not noticed that with those browsers.

Post reply on HN