Higher late than by no means, I suppose, 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 recognized to supply high-CPU utilization when working Firefox in comparison with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Thankfully, the problem appears like it’s resolved in the end.

“In line with 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, though these platforms shouldn’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 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 replace 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 could be tempting to get conspiratorial and assume that not fixing a Mozilla Firefox bug is Microsoft’s approach of making an attempt to get customers to modify to Microsoft’s personal Edge net browser, it possible has much more to do with the problem being so restricted in scope.

Firefox is a superb net browser, but it surely’s hardly the preferred. In line with StatCounter’s world Browser Market Share information, 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 online browser market (with Edge making up a mere 4.64% of that whole).

So, actually, Microsoft in all probability felt it had quite a few 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 line with Neowin (opens in new tab), Mozilla’s personal builders seem to have been integral to getting the bug fastened, so it is possible that Mozilla needed to do most if not the entire heavy lifting right here.