[Software] Windows was killing Firefox: a "bug" made it much slower

[Draeno]

 

Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world as it is installed on almost 3 out of 4 computers. However, that does not mean that it is the best browser on the market. One of the most negative points of this browser is the high consumption of resources when many tabs are opened.

This is a problem that Chrome has been dragging along for many years and that is especially worrying in macOS, a problem that Edge, the native Windows browser, does not offer, but that, if it has been present in Firefox, at least for the last 5 years , when the Mozilla Foundation, in charge of developing this browser that ensures user privacy, detected the problem.

The problem: Windows Defender
Firefox detected a problem with the consumption of Firefox resources in 2018, a problem to which they have tried to find a solution in the last 5 years without success, despite the different improvements that the browser has received in terms of performance and consumption of resources. resources. Last month, Mozilla engineers finally found the source of the problem, a source that was related to Microsoft Defender, Windows' native antivirus.

According to the company, through the MsMpEng.exe file, high requests are made to the kernel while Firefox was running in the background, requests that overloaded the use of the processor, slowing down the operation of the browser, even blocking it for several seconds, hence , in general, offer a lower performance than other browsers.

 

 

 

This problem caused Firefox to consume up to 5 times more resources than it really needed, especially when the number of open tabs was very high. Once the Mozilla Foundation discovered the problem, they contacted Microsoft and with the release of Windows Defender Update earlier this month, it has finally been fixed.

In fact, according to the different tests carried out by the Mozilla guys, Firefox's performance on Windows is 75% higher than it has been in the last 5 years. The foundation is investigating whether this problem is also occurring in other antiviruses, so it is possible that users who do not trust Microsoft's solution as an antivirus system may also be affected by high resource consumption without realizing it. They realize that the problem is not with the browser, but with the antivirus software that they have installed on their computer.

Regarding the high consumption of resources that Chrome has always experienced, it is unlikely that it could also be related to Defender. This is because the Google browser has the obnoxious habit of updating all the tabs that we have open in the background, even if we are not using them, thus increasing the consumption of resources completely unnecessarily.

 

https://www.softzone.es/noticias/programas/firefox-problemas-funcionamiento-windows/