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

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

#411

Post by kramerger »

jesse__ wrote: post #341
kramerger wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it should be one of the cheapest syscalls in the entire kernel. That's an educated guess... that is unfortunately very easy to disprove :(

I'd love if you'd elaborate on this. I know very little about what VirtualProtect actually does under the hood but, in theory, it should just have to flip a couple bits in the address space mapping which says what the protection level is.

> I know very little about [...] but, in theory,

You are assuming things you are unsure about :) Even if your assumption was correct things could change from one Windows update to another.

When I worked on a time sensitive java project, our test suite had benchmarks for JDK functions as simple as Arrays.copy() to make sure we are the first to notice if something changed under the hood.

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

#412

Post by b112 »

fryry wrote: post #309
b112 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just today I needed to run some software only available in .deb and only on Ubuntu 22.04. So whipped out an old laptop that had Ubuntu installed and ran sudo do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 22.04. boom! GUI gone and the terminal was flooded with weird filesystem errors. I had to spend the whole afternoon reinstalling from scratch. I would love a Linux daily driver but I've had similar experiences to the above every…

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/do-release-...

It says use it for non-GUI newest release upgrades? Why are you surprised the GUI disappeared?!

Also, why did to do that, if you wanted to keep the current version?

Anyhow, I never have such issues with Debian. Do bear in mind, Ubuntu(or any distro) is not Linux.

Are you going to call Linux "unstable", because you get a crappy phone with Android(which is judt more Linux).

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

#413

Post by b112 »

runnerup wrote: post #302
b112 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I’m talking about Ubuntu being hyper aggressive about upgrading my GPU drivers even after I turn off all auto updates and borking my entire OS install and this happening enough that it’s faster just to make scripts which auto reinstall Ubuntu and all my versioned packages from scratch. Or non-Ubuntu, software just randomly falling apart after 2 years. Like I need a newer kernel for a new Wi-Fi card but then I ne…

No. Apparently for you, Ubuntu breaks every week. Not Linux.

Don't blame the good, for the things bad does.

I go months on my Debian desktop without issues, through upgrades, and only reboot for kernel updates!

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

#414

Post by b3lvedere »

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.

Imagine what could have been saved if you stop loading ads in your browser.

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

#415

Post by NelsonMinar »

Interesting comment on Reddit from a Mozilla engineer: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/12hxqjl/comment/jf...

Careful to talk about how this is entirely a fix for Windows and will improve the experience of folks using other software, not just Firefox.

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

#416

Post by tristan957 »

IntelMiner wrote: post #130
axolotlgod wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Chrome really use significantly less resources than Firefox? Are there numbers there?

It took a lot longer for Firefox to get GPU accelerated video playback on Linux iirc Perhaps a "niche" use case for some, but there's a lot more Firefox users on Linux in particular

Isn't Chromium hardware acceleration currently broken on Linux?

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

#417

Post by TheKarateKid »

Karunamon wrote: post #188
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.

Is that because of the quality of Chrome or because Safari is a "blessed" application and probably gets to do things other applications do not? Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.

It's because of the quality of Chrome. Google's focus is on features and security, with efficiency secondary. Safari's primary focus is efficiency.

Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.

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

#418

Post by TheKarateKid »

HWR_14 wrote: post #376
Karunamon wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because of the quality of Chrome or because Safari is a "blessed" application and probably gets to do things other applications do not? Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.

If I had to guess, it's that Apple refuses to implement very CPU-heavy JS features they don't think add much value in Safari. I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API

I think it's more that Apple implements power saving behavior into the JS engine on desktop much like they do on mobile. For example, pausing background scripts on inactive tabs and disallowing autoplay on videos even on desktop.

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

#419

Post by CrimsonCape »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #402
rurp wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.

> Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. And many tech folks too. My phone is a tool, not a lifestyle. I don't need my tools constantly changing out from under me.

Here's an anecdote.

I like to look at websites that offer "last season" outdoor gear at discounted prices. The major frustration is that the sizes are never my size of shoe/shirt/etc because the popular sizes are gone sooner than the odd sizes.

There is no "domain-specific" improvement (The "domain" in this case being "last season discount retailer.") to the basic shopping cart ecommerce experience that would give me a way to flag my interested product or product category so that I could be notified when the item is in-stock.

This basic feature would vastly improve my interaction with the websites and would probably result in higher sales.

In today's world, that's a huge ask to have that kind of feature implemented.

Heck, even asking for a good "syntaxable" search seems to be an impossible ask. Imagine being able to search "Category: Shoes; Brand: "North Face"; Price: >50&&The fact that this is never implemented yet billions of dollars are poured into ecommerce development kinda reflects how the industry is focused on improving the tooling/back end and not the design.

I see vastly more posts in this vein: "Nobody really knows how this complicated spaghetti-like system works"

than in this vein: "X tool allowed us to build a Maserati of our domain."

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

#420

Post by [deleted] »

wholinator2 wrote: post #297
musicale wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for those unfamiliar with visualizing a doughnut, imagine a bagel-shaped treat of sweet cake-like dough, deep-fried and frosted, with optional sprinkles

For those unfamiliar with visuals a bagel, imagine a gear shape, smoothed out and without protrusions

[deleted]
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