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

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

#111

Post by wongarsu »

2ICofafireteam wrote: post #87
cjblack wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how much excess energy has been consumed, and won't be consumed any longer, as a result of this improvement - even just limited to reduced CPU usage on Windows machines using Firefox to watch Youtube. I love thinking about the impacts of tiny improvements at scale like this, might do some napkin math on it later and see if I can come up with something in the right order of magnitude.

Next: Canadian cars and their daytime running lights.

Running lights during daytime seems to reduce crashes by about 5-10%, and crashes consume a lot of energy. Depending on crash severity there's at a minimum the wasted time for all involved parties and frequently the necessity for repairs (including the production of replacement parts, paint etc), and at the high end the involvement of emergency personnel and their vehicles, hospital beds, doctors, the production of entire new cars as replacement for totaled ones, etc.

I'm not so sure that running lights isn't a net positive, especially with the introduction of LED lights.

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

#113

Post by throitallaway »

moonchrome wrote: post #54
jacobsenscott wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it mostly comes from the fact that computers are so fast now people write apps without worrying too much about performance - apps have always grown to use whatever resources are available. But when you app had to run on a pentium with 16MB of memory - you actually had to work hard on performance because you had such limited resources.

Yes but people have this nostalgic rose tinted glasses of software from that era - it was hot garbage that crashed all the time because they had so many constraints. Yeah GC introduces a bunch of overhead - but it also means you don't get segmentation faults, memory corruption, etc. Modern software is much more reliable than the software from that era, people nowadays complain when a button isn't working - back then…

> it was hot garbage that crashed all the time because they had so many constraints

Correlation != causation. I started using PCs heavily in the mid 90s, and yes "Illegal Operations" were abound. However, the SDLC has also come a long way with testing, automated QA, etc. Back then there was a lot more "wild west" going on for both hardware and software. Generally, practices are much more mature by default nowadays.

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

#114

Post by omnimus »

marcodiego wrote: post #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…

I have suspicion that lots of the "chrome is faster" is because devs optimise for chrome. More unique and "new" the API is the bigger the difference. Webgl is probably pretty different between browsers but nobody will bother to even look at webgl project in Firefox. It's pretty remarkable that such complex code can run pretty well in multiple different browsers.

Another example Chrome has rel=prerender support and some libraries use it to make loading pages faster. Safari and Firefox don't support it. But it's progressive enhancement so why not use it. Result is that Chrome seems faster. There are probably many ways to make things faster on the other side but nobody will bother.

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

#115

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

lionkor wrote: post #65
thewataccount wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a misconception that you need to do something "stupid" to get a virus which is simply not the case. 0 days exist, and worms are still a thing (looking at you samba). A great example is Pytorch just recently had a supply chain attack, and installing the nightly version between December 25th and December 30th, 2022 - would result in your home directory getting uploaded including ssh keys. Chrome also just had a…

windows users will also happily "run as administrator", while a lot of linux users know not to do that in my experience

>a lot of linux users know not to do that in my experience

README.md : "to get this to work, curl or wget the following script and run it as sudo"

Linux users: Aye

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

#117

Post by mulmen »

beAbU wrote: post #89
tomrod wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teeny tiny multiplied by 7 Billion by 365 days per year by 24 hours per day by a fraction of a kW does add up.

7B people are not watching youtube on Firefox 24/7 365 days a year.

But at any given moment someone is.

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

#118

Post by genocidicbunny »

Yoric wrote: post #85
psychphysic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have malwarebytes premium and defender CPU usage is nearly 100% at times bringin Firefox to a halt. Chrome works fine..I've been blaming Firefox so far.

In my experience (as a former Firefox dev), antivirus / antimalware software are really poorly behaved. They tend to: - require admin rights (which means that if they have vulnerabilities, it can take control of the entire machine, even if Firefox itself is sanboxed); - monkey-patch the Firefox executable in memory, which works (when it does) as long as the version of the software tracks closely the version of Firefo…

> - monkey-patch the Firefox executable in memory, which works (when it does) as long as the version of the software tracks closely the version of Firefox, which may or may not be the case;

This one was a frustratingly common cause of crashes when I worked in gamedev. So many crashes would end up being some overlay or antivirus monkeying about with memory.

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

#119

Post by bayindirh »

boringuser2 wrote: post #21
marcodiego wrote: post #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…

Firefox is significantly slower than chrome. This usually doesn't matter, but you can immediately see it in any page that A) has a massive DOM or B) uses complex regular expressions that eat up the engine

Firefox is slower than Chrome if and only if your DNS is not responding as fast. When backed by a performant DNS server, Firefox is generally faster than Chrome.

Don't ask me how I know it.

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

#120

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

zokier wrote: post #99
Narishma wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can disable it anymore in recent versions of Windows unless you install another AV software.

Getting rid of Defender is one of the best reasons to buy 3rd party AV.

3rd party AV is worse than defender
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