In March 2023, Mozilla developers were able to finally discover the source of the issue: Firefox relies and executes a very high number of calls to the OS kernel's VirtualProtect function while tracing Windows events (ETW). The issue was first reported 5 years ago, and it was seemingly a Firefox exclusive as it was sparing Edge and other third-party browsers like Chrome. Users were complaining that Defender was stressing the CPU while the Mozilla browser became laggy and unresponsive. The Antimalware Service Executable component of Defender (MsMpEng.exe) was acting strange, showing a high CPU usage when Firefox was running at the same time. We expect that on all these computers, MsMpEng.exe will consume around 75% less CPU than it did before when it is monitoring Firefox."įor more than five years, the security protection provided by Microsoft Defender was negatively affecting Firefox users during their web browsing sessions. "For Firefox this is particularly impactful because Firefox (not Defender!) relies a lot on VirtualProtect - which is monitored by MsMpEng.exe through ETW. "The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on Microsoft Defender's Real-time Protection feature (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume much less CPU than before when monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program through ETW (Event Tracing for Windows)." Update (April 11):The Mozilla developer who worked on fixing this performance issue and reported it to Microsoft added the following on a Reddit thread, clarifying the nature of the bugfix: Its arrival means that some unlucky Firefox users should now get a much smoother and better-performing experience while browsing the web. Can be used to enable incompatible extensions.Why it matters: Microsoft has released a crucial bug-fixing update to its Windows Defender antimalware application.
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