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Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

bugzilla.mozilla.org

11–20 of 223 posts

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#11

Random thought: I am not sure what the at-scale energy use reduction of this bug fix will be, but... If I had a pile of money I would consider creating a special bug bounty style program for energy use reduction. This might be a very efficient way to reduce carbon output from personal and data center computing.

I agree. Windows Defender and Gatekeeper on macOS both have pathological performance characteristics in some cases -- $$$ should act as a good incentive to figure them out.

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#13
> a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox

I wonder how many of the people who say "Firefox is significantly slower than chrome" are using windows... On my computer, Firefox IS slower than chrome but (with ad blockers enabled) by an insignificant amount. By still being "the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser" I'd prefer it to use over chrome even if it is a bit slower.

Of course, ms is no longer the "old micro$oft" but their history on how they handle competitor browsers makes one think how much interest they could have in investigating and fixing such a bug.

My takeaway is: prefer independent software as much as you can.

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#14

Random thought: I am not sure what the at-scale energy use reduction of this bug fix will be, but... If I had a pile of money I would consider creating a special bug bounty style program for energy use reduction. This might be a very efficient way to reduce carbon output from personal and data center computing.

Funny how that sort of thing can work out. I was involved in an industrial optimization company years ago. Microsoft came out with power-save features in their new release.

The staff at a metal-recycling company we were installing at, started complaining that the furnace would stop optimizing overnight. We investigated.

The controller computer would go into power-save mode, which suspended our control app. So the furnace would just sit there wasting power and burning up electrodes.

I calculated that during that week our furnace site wasted more power than all the power saved in America that year with power-save mode.

It would literally have been better if they'd never invented power save mode.

So be careful how much fiddling around we do. The law of unintended consequences will bite you in the butt every time.

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#16

Random thought: I am not sure what the at-scale energy use reduction of this bug fix will be, but... If I had a pile of money I would consider creating a special bug bounty style program for energy use reduction. This might be a very efficient way to reduce carbon output from personal and data center computing.

Funny how that sort of thing can work out. I was involved in an industrial optimization company years ago. Microsoft came out with power-save features in their new release. The staff at a metal-recycling company we were installing at, started complaining that the furnace would stop optimizing overnight. We investigated. The controller computer would go into power-save mode, which suspended our control app. So the fur…

Isn't this more a failing of the operator: using a consumer grade OS for an industrial case?

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#18

> a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox I wonder how many of the people who say "Firefox is significantly slower than chrome" are using windows... On my computer, Firefox IS slower than chrome but (with ad blockers enabled) by an insignificant amount. By still being "the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser" I'd prefer it to use over chrome even…

Firefox seems a little slower than Chrome on Linux but force enabling some of the GPU offload stuff seemed to help.

Re: Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how that sort of thing can work out. I was involved in an industrial optimization company years ago. Microsoft came out with power-save features in their new release. The staff at a metal-recycling company we were installing at, started complaining that the furnace would stop optimizing overnight. We investigated. The controller computer would go into power-save mode, which suspended our control app. So the fur…

Isn't this more a failing of the operator: using a consumer grade OS for an industrial case?

be very careful what you define as “consumer grade”, microsoft officially positions variants of windows as professional, industrial and enterprise grade.

Linux as she is written comes with no warranty of anything, it is much more “consumer grade” than those variants of windows.

I think even enterprise linux does not come with support for industrial applications.

(I say this as a huge proponent of Linux supremacy)

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