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.
Perhaps a "niche" use case for some, but there's a lot more Firefox users on Linux in particular
1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-compa...
Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.
Based on the increased laptop battery life I notice, so is using Edge on Windows.
It makes sense that both Apple and Microsoft can extract the best out of their OS + browser. There's no way Firefox can compete on such OS specific optimizations.
The new Edge based on Chromium performs better than Chrome with regards to power consumptions.
The old Edge was even better in terms of power consumption. Like a few extra hours of battery life.
Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.
It’s entirely possible that Safari is intentionally avoiding features that make it wake up-
I doubt that it does anything unavailable to other browsers, thats MS territory, because they wanted features. I feel like safari, by contrast, doesn't want to add features.
IME, Safari is no better than Brave in terms of battery, even when I’ve got hundreds of tabs open.
Besides, there's some precedent set in 1998 by a certain OS that "favored" their embedded browser over the competition, so I doubt Apple would want to tickle that fancy.
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
> Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life.
Seeing that MacOS has called out which apps are using the most energy for years, users can definitely tell which apps are using the most battery life.
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.
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.
I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API
Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.
- Switching from Firefox to Chrome might be similar to switching between two car models, one consuming less energy than the other.
- Fixing this bug is more like going to a car workshop to fix an injector issue in your car that was causing higher fuel consumption and more pollutants.
The first one is really a matter of tradeoffs and personal choices. The second one is less of a choice and more of an actual issue that was left due to negligence. Hardly similar.
One could also argue that the OS is the car, the browser is the chauffeur, and the user is the passenger.
Quoting the Mozilla engineer responsible for most of the recent activity on the bug:
"This problem has two sides: Microsoft was doing a lot of useless computations upon each event; and we are generating a lot of events. The combination is explosive. Now that Microsoft has done their part of the job, we need to reduce our dependency to VirtualProtect."
It was also noted elsewhere in the thread that similar, though less severe, CPU impact is seen with other antivirus products.
Microsoft was doing something wrong that made this operation more expensive than it needed to be, but Mozilla is also doing this far more than any other browser.
The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.
You're right in principle, but in practice even factoring in externalities electricity prices won't be high enough for people to care. Using current US carbon intensity for electricity generation[1] and the higher end estimates for the social cost of carbon[2] gets us carbon costs of $0.142 per kWh. The average prices in US is $0.168. Adding in carbon costs would almost double the price, but there are countries with even higher electricity prices[4] and they're not exactly switching to more efficient software in droves to save energy.
[1] https://emissionsindex.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Carbon_p...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
i've read everywhere that Firefox at this point is far more energy efficient than Chrome...is that not true?
Nah, I like my privacy. How about replacing Electron apps with native apps instead?
> imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
Imagine the privacy savings if Chrome users switched to Firefox.
This is why I left firefox.
In seriousness, though, this is an issue. Elsewhere, I observe arguments about eg userbenchmark rankings, and the comparative relevance of single-core vs multicore performance. Are you playing a game, or rendering video 24/7 -- or running some entirely synthetic workload that allows for a peak performance the real world would never achieve? Same kinda problem.
Situation seems to happen some time after visiting ad-heavy sites (yeah I know I should install an ad-blocker). Have others noticed this? Seems to be Chrome. I also use Firefox and occasionally Safari but have not noticed that with those browsers.
Far worse due to privacy/adblock addons.
Enlighten us.
Imagine the power savings if everyone used pihole, ublock etc.
Second uses more power than the first and is better. Do it!
Imagine the energy squandered on all the extra goods and services bought by users using a browser owned by an advertising company, instead of Firefox.
And then imagine Safari on an M1.
The optimum is likely somewhere where most people use the currently most efficient solution and others keep alternatives alive and competitive.
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.
Performance is time, energy, heat. It’s one of the easiest features to get and there are lots of tools, research, and philosophies to help get it. Memory and storage are similar.
For anyone working on large scale apps that are on millions of devices, hundreds of thousands of servers, or even just some back office guy who has minutes less stress in his day, performance benefits the world. For programmers, it’s one of the easiest ways to Save the Planet™.
In some cases you convince your organization to shift focus onto more useful products, and that can be a really great feeling. In other cases (company is too large, management too committed) it helps you confront exactly who you're working for. Because if you're going to sell your soul, you should at least make sure you're getting a good price.
Perhaps I’m getting into a bit of a niche here, but the rise of stringy formats for data transfer concerns me. There are many-stage pipelines on machines that agree on what a 64 bit integer is, yet each stage performs encoding and decoding of JSON twice (decoding upon receipt, encoding to pass it on to the right place, decoding the response, encoding it in another manner to reply to the original sender). Sounds like a minor concern, but the scale of this instinctively feels like it’d dwarf 250MW globally.
… anyway…
Why make the world worse for ourselves and our children when you have other options?
Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.
And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.
Optimizing performance and fixing crashes/bugs/dataloss aren't mutually exclusive, either. Developers who care less about code quality than checking boxes for features requested by management or customers, will write code that's both suboptimal and buggy.
How on earth would you know that? No, incorrect.
I'm not sure the devs stopped caring as much as the powers at be. Software development has become more commoditized than we want to believe. Devs following an agile workflow with every intent of performing multiple rounds of optimization find that the product gets shipped as soon as it approximates the thing that had been conceived originally.
It doesn't look like an immediate failure, so the less that leadership takes from it is frequently that the level of maturity they shipped is safe. The cycle continues and eventually folks lower down succumb to this shipping pattern. The only things that get them to optimize is competition that successfully drive home their win was due to performance. This doesn't always lead to optimizations when you are an incumbent who can still close more feature gaps because those often result in higher sales and revenue.
Somewhere I saw a rough figure about phones. Something like: if everyone was able to keep their phone one year longer, it would be the equivalent of 600,000 cars off the road or something. (Just looked it up - source is possibly the founder of iFixit).
But you know, development velocity or whatever.
This is a result of:
* Single-core performance no longer dramatically improving - almost plateauing
* The rate or extent of "bells and whistles" and other OS overhead being added - decreasing.
* Budget consumer CPUs having reached smooth desktop performance (with sufficient memory and and an SSD) already, even with multiple applications open.
.. and all of these had not been the case during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Now, if your machine's hardware doesn't brake down - and you're just a plain desktop user - your motivation for throwing away your machine is quite limited.
---
Of course, this is not the case for smartphones, we're still on the roller-coaster there.
Absolutely! Most non-tech folks would be delighted by this. Regular users generally don't care one bit about whatever fad style or trendy feature got added with the latest update, they are just annoyed that their buttons or icons got moved around.
And many tech folks too. My phone is a tool, not a lifestyle. I don't need my tools constantly changing out from under me.
I like to look at websites that offer "last season" outdoor gear at discounted prices. The major frustration is that the sizes are never my size of shoe/shirt/etc because the popular sizes are gone sooner than the odd sizes.
There is no "domain-specific" improvement (The "domain" in this case being "last season discount retailer.") to the basic shopping cart ecommerce experience that would give me a way to flag my interested product or product category so that I could be notified when the item is in-stock.
This basic feature would vastly improve my interaction with the websites and would probably result in higher sales.
In today's world, that's a huge ask to have that kind of feature implemented.
Heck, even asking for a good "syntaxable" search seems to be an impossible ask. Imagine being able to search "Category: Shoes; Brand: "North Face"; Price: >50&&<120"
The fact that this is never implemented yet billions of dollars are poured into ecommerce development kinda reflects how the industry is focused on improving the tooling/back end and not the design.
I see vastly more posts in this vein: "Nobody really knows how this complicated spaghetti-like system works"
than in this vein: "X tool allowed us to build a Maserati of our domain."
- 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.
- Users buy new computers too. Money is poured into R&D for even faster computers.
- Hardware companies release faster hardware
- Developers buy new, fast computers
And the cycle continues.
For general purpose computing, there's not really any meaningful difference between my computer today and my computer 15 years ago. But I can't use that old computer, because modern programs don't work well on it any more. I can't imagine how slow modern Discord or Microsoft Teams would run on my old 2012 macbook air - even though that machine is orders of magnitude faster than the computer I was using to chat on IRC in the late 90s.
I'm low key convinced that if computers and phones stopped getting faster tomorrow, the software industry would grumble but get on with things and adapt. Users wouldn't really notice anything change, except we'd all be richer because we would no longer need to buy new computers every few years.
There's a few notable exceptions of course: modern AI, video production & animation, and massive cloud services (like Google and Netflix) who actually optimize their code. I'm on the fence about compilers - do LLVM & rustc really need to be that slow? Netflix might never make it to 8k video (boo hoo). And ray traced video games might not happen. But the average consumer would probably be delighted. And the savings to the environment would be insane.
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 had to go searching for stuff the executable required.
My current desktop has a Samsung 970 NVME SSD, it boots up in like 20 seconds or something, and everything is extremely responsive as far as reading from the disk goes.
It's interesting that the one thing that hasn't been completely neutralized by the treadmill is SSDs!
Also the LLVM and Rustc thing is interesting. I imagine they are doing much more advanced optimizations than what compilers did 20 years ago so they probably have a good excuse, but I think these optimizations are also neutralized by the treadmill eventually.
it is an absolute abomination, and these words does not even remotely do justice to just how horrible it is
That's about 2.2 TWh per year. A decent estimate for average worldwide CO2 intensity of electricity is 400 gCO2e/kWh (that's 400 tons per GWh). A typical personal footprint including some international flights will be in the tens of tons.
I think this is probably a major blocker for many enterprise users, and wish Mozilla would have fixed it.
edit: it looks like they may have fixed this in the past couple years, though you might have to go poking around in about:config.
Who knows what edge case triggered that bug to manifest but I for one haven't seen it in the wild in the years we've been using FF.
Probably difficult in such a large org to allocate dev resources to chase down and fix a bug few people were impacted by.
That same site also suggests that Firefox has around 200e6 monthly active users, the average user uses Firefox 3.5 days a week, and for 5.5 hours per day.
My math could be wrong, but taking the above into account, and arnaudsm's 5 W estimate, I come up with an upper bound of around 80 MW. Discount that further by whatever proportion of Windows users you assume were actually affected. Not a whole coal power plant, but nothing to sneeze at.
Other - 4.09%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265033/proportion-of-ope...
I don't like video games and they are not-necessary so I propose that we ban them globally, or only allow gaming if using renewable energy. If you don't live in a place where this is an option, too bad!
Maybe instead of this we require all games to be limited in graphical effect (imagine early source games or something). We could save a lot of power globally if we enforced this.
This is why I strongly dislike this line of thinking. I don't think power plants work that way anyways, they probably make a constant-ish amount of power rather than taking exactly 50w worth of fuel every time someone opens up Call Of Duty.
There are also much lower hanging fruit to get upset about if you care about the planet, like cars with large motors or people with heated drive ways (yes thats a thing).
My intention was to compare the listed things against MicroSoft engineers making mistakes while programming Windows Defender (the quote below), or programmers writing bugs in general.
>Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.
That's not how power or energy works.
5 [W*hr/day] (Kept in energy units per interval rather than average power).
200e6 users/day who surf for maybe 4 hours/day
5 * 200e6 * 4 / 24 = 133 [MW*hr/day] (133/24 = 5.5 MW)
A typical US home uses 11 [MW*hr/y] or 0.36 [MW*hr/day].
(Convert to power draw, that's 0.015 MW.)
mean consumption of roughly 400 US homes (133 / 0.36).
The smallest US grid-tied operational nuclear power plant produces 600 MW. 133 MW very small coal power plant would 400 MW.
5W/user * 200e6 user * 4h/24h = 167 MW
11 MWh/a/home = 0.00125 MW/home
167 MW / (0.00125 MW/home) = 133 000 homeUnfortunately devs dont realize how needlessly power hungry software is when they don't need to be. But hey, its easier to use electron and javascript than it is to save the planet.
How did you come to this?
Sounds good
> like ESET
What?! ESET used to burn constant CPU when wifi disconnected.
That might be a bit too kind given how much Google liked to Oops Firefox. Wouldn't be surprised if MS did too.
Oops:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...
Produces in an hour, four hours?
300 million users * 4 hours/day * 5 watts = an average continuous savings of 250 MW.