Higher late than by no means, I assume, however Microsoft lastly received round to fixing a five-year-old high-CPU utilization bug in Mozilla Firefox.
The bug, which is tied to Home windows Defender’s Antimalware Service Executable course of, has been identified to supply high-CPU utilization when working Firefox in comparison with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Fortuitously, the difficulty seems like it’s resolved in the end.
“In accordance with Microsoft, this shall be deployed to all customers as a part of common definition updates, that are packaged independently from OS updates,” Yannis Juglaret, a Mozilla developer, wrote on Mozilla’s Bugzilla message board last month (opens in new tab). “This contains even Home windows 7 and eight.1 customers, despite the fact that these platforms mustn’t have had the efficiency concern with Firefox within the first place as a result of the ETW occasions that trigger it don’t exist on these older variations of Home windows. So so far as I perceive, solely customers that will explicitly reject definition updates (which doesn’t sound like one thing cheap to do together with your AV) wouldn’t get the repair.”
That update has now rolled out (opens in new tab), so Firefox customers ought to hopefully see noticeably higher efficiency.
Okay, so why did it take this lengthy to repair?
5 years is a really very long time for a bug repair.
And whereas it is likely to be tempting to get conspiratorial and assume that not fixing a Mozilla Firefox bug is Microsoft’s method of attempting to get customers to change to Microsoft’s personal Edge internet browser, it probably has much more to do with the difficulty being so restricted in scope.
Firefox is a superb internet browser, but it surely’s hardly the most well-liked. In accordance with StatCounter’s world Browser Market Share knowledge, Firefox is utilized by simply 2.93% of all customers, whereas Chrome and Edge, that are based mostly on the identical Chromium basis, account for simply shy of 70% of the net browser market (with Edge making up a mere 4.64% of that whole).
So, actually, Microsoft in all probability felt it had numerous higher issues to do with its developer’s time than to go monitor down a distinct segment efficiency bug affecting so few customers. And, in response to Neowin (opens in new tab), Mozilla’s personal builders seem to have been integral to getting the bug mounted, so it is probably that Mozilla needed to do most if not the entire heavy lifting right here.
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