Higher late than by no means, I assume, however Microsoft lastly bought 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. Happily, the difficulty seems like it’s resolved in the end.
“Based on Microsoft, this might 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 final month (opens in new tab). “This consists of even Home windows 7 and eight.1 customers, despite the fact that these platforms mustn’t have had the efficiency difficulty 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 might explicitly reject definition updates (which doesn’t sound like one thing affordable 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 means of making an attempt to get customers to change to Microsoft’s personal Edge net browser, it possible has much more to do with the difficulty being so restricted in scope.
Firefox is a superb net browser, but it surely’s hardly the most well-liked. Based on StatCounter’s international Browser Market Share information, Firefox is utilized by simply 2.93% of all customers, whereas Chrome and Edge, that are primarily based on the identical Chromium basis, account for simply shy of 70% of the online browser market (with Edge making up a mere 4.64% of that whole).
So, actually, Microsoft most likely felt it had plenty of higher issues to do with its developer’s time than to go observe down a distinct segment efficiency bug affecting so few customers. And, in accordance with Neowin (opens in new tab), Mozilla’s personal builders seem to have been integral to getting the bug mounted, so it is possible that Mozilla needed to do most if not the entire heavy lifting right here.