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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%

#431

Post by rhaway84773 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #120
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.

> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.

Those are 2 very different things.

In switching browsers, you get different features, workflows and functionality, many of which you prefer on Firefox, which is why you’re using it.

With this bug fix, there is absolutely no loss or change in functionality (other than increased battery life), and yet you’re getting the benefits.

This bug is pure waste.

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

#432

Post by redeeman »

chlorion wrote: post #388
josephg wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Most things most users do on our computers could be done just fine on a computer from 10 years ago. I think we're on a performance treadmill like this: - Developers get new, fast devices (yay). We make our software just fast enough to run smoothly (enough) on our own devices. Then we ship it. - Users' computers are slower than the developers' computers. Users experience is bad because the software is slow. - Use…

This is interesting, but maybe our software is doing a lot more today than it was back then. I guess the question is whether those things are necessary. There is of course some software that is just slower because of negligence too. I remember using a computer 20 years, and they would take multiple minutes to boot into something that was usable, and executing programs would take quite a few seconds because the HDD ha…

chromium 111 source is 1.7GB compressed with xz(lzma). google has completely lost whatever minds they may have had, and included more code than one would imagine exists in the whole damn world.

it is an absolute abomination, and these words does not even remotely do justice to just how horrible it is

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

#433

Post by 0x4c6565 »

dgellow wrote: post #35

> mpengine.dll version 1.1.20200.4 was released on April 4, so the fix should be available for everybody now. See the end of comment 91 to know what version you are using. Also, the latest discoveries in bug 1822650 comment 6 suggest that we can go even further down in CPU usage, with all antivirus software this time, not just Windows Defender. Really nice to see open collaboration between Mozilla and Microsoft devel…

This update is causing intermittent browsing issues in Firefox and Chrome for me and several others (not Edge, though). Getting 'PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR' in Firefox, with Chrome experience issues at the same time (though Chrome does eventually load the page)

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

#434

Post by CatWChainsaw »

alpaca128 wrote: post #101
layer8 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never attribute to malice…

Nowadays a lot of malicious acts are intentionally disguised as stupidity and incompetence. Not necessarily in this case, but that quote really is showing its age.

Incompetence and malice are one and the same.

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

#435

Post by MyelinatedT »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #390
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.

Takeaway: If you're working for a tech company with billions of users, your personal CO2 footprint is completely irrelevant. Rather than agonizing over flights vs. trains, beef vs. pork vs. vegan alternatives, heating etc. - find some small thing that you have access to and that you can optimize. That's about 2.2 TWh per year. A decent estimate for average worldwide CO2 intensity of electricity is 400 gCO2e/kWh (that…

It's worth considering that not all Wh are equal in environmental impact. In the case of many (most?) big tech firms, a large proportion of their energy consumption is sourced from renewable sources.

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

#436

Post by BuckRogers »

garbagecoder wrote: post #159
jupp0r wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your job is, but in my job: - we implement a feature, test it thoroughly for functional and non-functional requirements - when we are happy, we release it I don't see myself being responsible for a third party software company coming along years later and introducing a bug in code that injects itself between my software and the operating system that users of the software I wrote happens to install at so…

You basically just said you stop supporting things once they ship. Doesn’t work properly on Windows? Shrug.

Which is my original point about quality software engineering.. Apparently many don’t test, and if it’s broken, don’t care!

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

#437

Post by Karunamon »

scarface74 wrote: post #383
saagarjha wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple can and does leave things out of that repo.

So you think there is a conspiracy by Apple to not allow third parties to be battery efficient and make there hardware look bad? But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.

I absolutely think there is a conspiracy (inasmuch as "conspiracy" can be defined as "not going out of their way to change it") to make the competitors to Apple applications look worse than their own offerings. It does not reflect poorly on Apple when Firefox performs worse and uses more memory and battery than Safari.

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

#438

Post by scarface74 »

Karunamon wrote: post #437
scarface74 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think there is a conspiracy by Apple to not allow third parties to be battery efficient and make there hardware look bad? But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.

I absolutely think there is a conspiracy (inasmuch as "conspiracy" can be defined as "not going out of their way to change it") to make the competitors to Apple applications look worse than their own offerings. It does not reflect poorly on Apple when Firefox performs worse and uses more memory and battery than Safari.

How is Apple suppose to change Firefox and Chrome’s source code?

If either browser’s manufacturer wants to see what Apple does to make Safari more battery efficient, they are free to look at the source code to WebKit.

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

#439

Post by drumttocs8 »

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.

How are you calculating 5W? And subsequently 20Wh?
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