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

Post by eviks » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:23 AM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #77

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #41

Is Windows Defender even worth enabling? It eats up a lot of CPU. It doesn’t seem like much help in a default update enabled system where you are using a regular user account instead of an administrator account. In addition, anti-virus and real time scanning is itself potential surface area for an exploit (for example a few years back there was an exploit based on Norton antivirus email scanner).

Yes. It uses next to no system resources (issues like this aside), it integrates perfectly with Windows (it comes from Microsoft, after all), it's reasonably effective (to the chagrin of AV vendors the world over), and it isn't intrusive.

Post by tsujamin » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:12 AM UTC

bboygravity wrote: post #166

Yoric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This almost reads like Defender makes machines less secure on purpose. Makes me wonder: Does windows Defender just double as another deliberate NSA backdoor?

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:37 AM UTC

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…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:50 AM UTC

diego_sandoval wrote: post #157

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are such better options available. Meh, I see Ubuntu black screens in public appliances as well.

All options are bad. As a species, we're incapable of making a good operating system.

Post by botanical » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:51 AM UTC

fsckboy wrote: post #81

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.

firefox browser share is teeny tiny these days