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Comment by aforwardslash | Hacker News Reader

Going to be downvoted, but I call bullshit on this. Bitflips are frequent (and yes ECC is an improvement but does not solve the problem), but not that frequent. One can either assume users that enabled telemetry are an odd bunch with flaky hardware, or the implementation isnt actually detecting bitflips (potentially, as the messages indicate), but a plathora of problems. Having a 1/10 probability a given struct is either processed wrong, parsed wrong or saved wrong would have pretty severe effects in many, many scenarios - from image editing to cad. Also, bitflips on flaky hardware dont choose protection rings - it would also affect the OS routines such as reading/writing to devices and everything else that touches memory. Yup, i've seen plenty of faulty ram systems (many WinME crashes were actually caused by defective ram sticks that would run fine with W98), it doesnt choose browsers or applications.

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It says 10% of crashes

If Firefox itself has so few bugs that it crashes very infrequently, it is not contradictory to what you are saying.

I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of crashes in my "hello world" script are caused by bit flips.

Just updated with a comment. I see firefox crash routinely, so apparently our experiences are quite different :)

You should look at about:crashes and see if there's any commonality in the causes, or bugs associated with them (though often bugs won't be associated with the crash if it isn't filed from crash-stats or have the crash signature in the bug)

Maybe you should check your memory? I recently started to get quite a lot of Firefox crashes, and definitely contributed to this statistic. In the end, the problem was indeed memory - crashes stopped after I tuned down some of the timings. And I used this RAM for a few years with my original settings (XMP profile) without issue.

I experience them in several different devices; On my main device, I have hundreds of chrome tabs and often many workloads running that would be completely corrupt with random bit flips. I'm not discarding the possibility of faulty RAM completely, I just take the measurement of the tweet with a huge grain of salt - after all, I still remember when the FF team constantly denied - for more than half a decade - that the browser had serious memory leak problems, so its not like there isn't a history of pointing out other causes for FF crashes.

The last time I can recall Firefox crashing was when I was using Windows Vista. This definitely sounds like a problem with your system.

How can you possibly be this confident if you don't know the number of times Firefox was run and number of bug reports submitted? Say it's run 100,000,000 times, 1000 reports are submitted, and 10 are bit flips. Seems reasonable. You're misinterpreting what they are saying.

10% of 1000 isnt 10; its 100.And no, its not reasonable - the main reason is that you cannot reliably tell if something is a bit flip or not remotely, because bitflips affect both code and data. Also, 10% of a semi-obscure specific category of failures seems to indicate that the population submitting crashes isn't random enough. I'm a layman in statistics, but this doesn't seem correct, at least not without concrete details on the kinds of bugs being reported and the methodology used. Claiming 10% and being able to demonstrate 10% are different things - and the tweet thread indicates that is this clickbait - something in the lines of "may potentially be a bit-flip". Well, every error may be a bit flip.

Also having worked in big software with many users, this also doesn't match the data we had.

The only explanation I can see is if Firefox is installed on a user base of incredibly low quality hardware.

I forgot to mention - yes Im assuming 100% of firefox instances crash, if run long enough; I (still) use firefox as a second browser.

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