A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
LOL, nah, Firefox isn’t that stable. If 10% of crashes were caused by bad RAM, it means 90% were still caused by something else.
(My install regularly gets a memory leak that eventually makes my system unusable, BTW. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of Firefox itself – more likely Javascript running in tabs, maybe interacting with an extension or something, and some of the blame goes to the kernel’s poor handling of low memory conditions – but it’s definitely not “dev humblebrag stable” for me.)
A lot of these crashes were caused by third party security software injecting code into firefox. There was also some malware, and utilities like driver helpers.
I don’t have precise numbers, but you may be able to search for it.
10% of all crashes is definitively a brag. Crashes due to faulty hardware/bitflips is rare rare, generally I would expect that percentage to be less than 1% in any complex app
This is how dev humblebrag sounds like.
Our app is so stable only random hardware events like bitflips can crash it.
LOL, nah, Firefox isn’t that stable. If 10% of crashes were caused by bad RAM, it means 90% were still caused by something else.
(My install regularly gets a memory leak that eventually makes my system unusable, BTW. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of Firefox itself – more likely Javascript running in tabs, maybe interacting with an extension or something, and some of the blame goes to the kernel’s poor handling of low memory conditions – but it’s definitely not “dev humblebrag stable” for me.)
A lot of these crashes were caused by third party security software injecting code into firefox. There was also some malware, and utilities like driver helpers.
I don’t have precise numbers, but you may be able to search for it.
10% of all crashes is definitively a brag. Crashes due to faulty hardware/bitflips is rare rare, generally I would expect that percentage to be less than 1% in any complex app