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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

#71

Post by Dalewyn »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14
consumer451 wrote: post #10

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…

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

Also known as: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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

#72

Post by jacquesm »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #16
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

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?

Worse: a consumer grade OS with a reputation for blue screens and random reboots, remote updates and other niceties that you really don't want when you're controlling real world hardware.

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

#73

Post by jacquesm »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #26
paulryanrogers wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Such distinctions were not so available back then.

Absolutely they were. Plenty of real time options since the 80's.

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

#74

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

crooked-v wrote: post #64
cptskippy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the definition of huge amount of RAM? How does Chrome perform when it's RAM constricted? Are we blaming Firefox for poorly designed websites? It feels like this is a straw man constructed to bash Firefox, rather than a real world scenario.

Extremely poorly-optimized websites are far more common these days than even mildly performant ones.

Do you have an example of one with 10,000 event handlers? If the case where Firefox falls isn't real it doesn't matter that other sites suck (not arguing that fact).

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

#75

Post by Dalewyn »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #49
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I purchased a license of a proper antivirus software Which is that? For years (and come to think of it, this goes back to the 2000's or even 90's), AV / antimalware software comes across as scareware, using tricks to ensure you're afraid of not having it. And second, who here has ever had a virus in the past ten years?

> Which is that? I purchased a license of ESET Internet Security, and full disclosure: back in early 2017, I worked at an ESET-licensed reseller as a Presales and Support Engineer, so I know how to fine-tune it and all the ins and outs. By nature, it's very lightweight (330 Mb RAM footprint), but you can fine-tune it even more if you want. > And second, who here has ever had a virus in the past ten years? We the peop…

>Some people tell me: "bUt tHaT'S BeCaUsE ThEy aRe vIsItInG WeIrD SiTeS," well, even if you stick to the common social media sites and usual news sites, you will get infected.

I recall reading a study a few years back saying how it's safer to browse porn sites than it is to browse what most would call "common" sites such as retailers.

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

#76

Post by ziml77 »

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…

It's not just Windows that it's worse on though. It doesn't perform well on macOS either. It's not as bad as it used to be when it had a horrible power draining interaction with display scaling on macOS, but it's still isn't as efficient as Chrome or Safari.

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

#77

Post by Dalewyn »

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.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Dalewyn wrote: post #75
ivanmontillam wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is that? I purchased a license of ESET Internet Security, and full disclosure: back in early 2017, I worked at an ESET-licensed reseller as a Presales and Support Engineer, so I know how to fine-tune it and all the ins and outs. By nature, it's very lightweight (330 Mb RAM footprint), but you can fine-tune it even more if you want. > And second, who here has ever had a virus in the past ten years? We the peop…

>Some people tell me: "bUt tHaT'S BeCaUsE ThEy aRe vIsItInG WeIrD SiTeS," well, even if you stick to the common social media sites and usual news sites, you will get infected. I recall reading a study a few years back saying how it's safer to browse porn sites than it is to browse what most would call "common" sites such as retailers.

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by longsword »

thewataccount wrote: post #56
ravenstine wrote: post #46

Windows Defender is a long standing bug in the Windows operating system. ;) My impression is that its invention was for the sole purpose of eradicating the idea that Windows is insecure and prone to viruses, which explains why it can be overzealous and CPU hungry. I would only enable it for family members who don't know what they are doing. For some reason, I haven't needed any form of active virus scanning in someth…

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…

There will always be 0 days out there, but they will always be very expensive and rare. If you have the ressources to buy or find a 0-day, you definetly won't blow it by executing known malware, or other stuff, which falls under the detected by AV's. I really don't thing that having AV installed will protect any user from a 0-day.

On the other side, you install a very invasive av software, which runs as privileged user and intercepts everything thats happening on your system. They even make a great target for malware by themself. Just recently ClamAV had a bug in it's file scanner, which let to an rce: CVE-2023-20032

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

#80

Post by ivanmontillam »

Dalewyn wrote: post #75
ivanmontillam wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is that? I purchased a license of ESET Internet Security, and full disclosure: back in early 2017, I worked at an ESET-licensed reseller as a Presales and Support Engineer, so I know how to fine-tune it and all the ins and outs. By nature, it's very lightweight (330 Mb RAM footprint), but you can fine-tune it even more if you want. > And second, who here has ever had a virus in the past ten years? We the peop…

>Some people tell me: "bUt tHaT'S BeCaUsE ThEy aRe vIsItInG WeIrD SiTeS," well, even if you stick to the common social media sites and usual news sites, you will get infected. I recall reading a study a few years back saying how it's safer to browse porn sites than it is to browse what most would call "common" sites such as retailers.

Interesting, my assumption would be that porn sites must clean themselves from that malware-ish reputation, whereas "common" sites with low-end ad networks don't have it (but they are prone to gain it, because of careless/negligent ad bidder verification).
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