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A comment on Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by alluro2 on Monday April 10, 2023 @04:48PM (#35517215)
I don't think there's any error to fix. It's a feature - casting light from the video onto the UI, using JS, surely takes that amount of CPU.

The question of why it is on by default stands - because it's little bit of eye candy, vs people's laptop batteries, CPU that could have been used to get other stuff done faster - so also their time, device thermals etc... I don't think it's just unnecessarily salty to point out how the choice to turn this on by default should have been more nuanced and thought through.

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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by lobocinza on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:21PM (#35517540)
IMO the implementation sucks and the feature is questionable. Recently I set the browser to dark mode, which tells YT to also use dark mode, and if I haven't read here I wouldn't know that this is a toggleable feature. It's sad when we can't tell a feature and a bug apart.
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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by Consultant32452 on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:43PM (#35517760)
Not being able to distinguish between a feature and a bug is a feature, not a bug.
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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by lobocinza on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:52AM (#35523311)
It's an UI issue.
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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by tempestn on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:12PM (#35517467)
How much can websites determine about the power of the device they're running on? Obviously it'd be a security issue for them to know too much, but it would be nice to be able to progressively enhance the experience for more powerful devices that can handle it, beyond just mobile vs PC. Even just knowing whether a device was running off battery power could be useful.
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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by simlevesque on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:18PM (#35517511)
Here's what's available, requires permissions:

- BatteryManager.charging

- BatteryManager.chargingTime

- BatteryManager.dischargingTime

- BatteryManager.level

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/BatteryMana...

https://caniuse.com/?search=BatteryManager

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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by rileyphone on Monday April 10, 2023 @05:29PM (#35517621)
Isn't available in Firefox though...
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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by JohnFen on Monday April 10, 2023 @07:08PM (#35518515)
I don't think you really want websites to make this determination anyway. There are a million reasons why a user might want a website to use fewer resources than their machine could support.

It should just be a setting the user can select. No probing of the machine necessary.

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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by tempestn on Monday April 10, 2023 @10:10PM (#35519858)
What should be a setting? This specific youtube ambience thing? That is, but it shows the issue - you need to pick a default, and most people won't know they can change it. Having some idea of the capabilities of the device you're running on could allow you to choose sensible defaults.

But if you mean there should be a setting in the browser that websites could check, I agree that could be better.

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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by JohnFen on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:42PM (#35527640)
Sensible defaults go a long way, yes! Although in the case of this YouTube thing, I think the sensible default is to have it disabled regardless of the capabilities of the machine.
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