12 ms·

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equ

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

drumttocs8 4y ago
How are you calculating 5W? And subsequently 20Wh?
pjmlp 4y ago
If it isn't on the Sprint board it doesn't exist.
- dylan604 4y ago
  You also have to assume that at least one Microsoft employee has Firefox installed. There's no bug if there's no users
  - sterlind 4y ago
    I work at MS, tried to use Firefox but couldn't because FF doesn't integrate with the Windows cert store. Crucially, this keeps Windows Hello (TPM auth) from working, which makes it useless for any internal websites. For a while I used a hand-compiled PKCS#12 plugin that bridged to the cert store, but that was extremely fragile and eventually I gave up. I think this is probably a major blocker for many enterprise users, and wish Mozilla would have fixed it. edit: it looks like they may have fixed this in the past couple years, though you might have to go poking around in about:config.
    - pixel16 4y ago
      Microsoft now blocks non edge browsers with conditional access policies.
    - reynoldsbd 4y ago
      Current MS employee here. For a time this was true, but FF recently added this integration. No about:config needed, there’s simply a checkbox under the FF security settings. Since this was added, I have gone back to using FF as my daily driver, and I haven’t really encountered any other friction.
      - protastus 4y ago
        Indeed. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso
    - anonymousiam 4y ago
      Firefox not integrating with the Windows cert store is actually a good thing in many use cases. The ability to have an alternate browser that's not integrated has saved my butt more than once.
cutler 4y ago
Don't underestimate Microsoft Won’t Fix which helped IE dominate the browser market for over a decade.
chillstreem 4y ago
doesn't this bug only manifest itself if one is using microsoft defender as their only security solution, and not a 3rd party AV/IS? if so, then the number of Firefox users in this calculation is much lower.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I don't know if that's the case. I'm a Firefox user but consider all the 3rd party apps nearly as much malware as the things they are trying to solve. I run strictly defender and try to make good choices when downloading and browsing.
  - chillstreem 4y ago
    well, if we're taking strictly subjective personal experiences as some sort of a relevant benchmark, then I'm a Windows Firefox user that has never used MS defender for any length of time, and always strictly a reliable low-impact 3rd party AV like ESET or Emsisoft. so I guess the two of us cancel each other out.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      So based upon rigorous analysis, approximately half of all Firefox users use the default choice, and half use a different AV.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      > strictly a reliable low-impact 3rd party AV Sounds good > like ESET What?! ESET used to burn constant CPU when wifi disconnected.
  - UberFly 4y ago
    I actually replace Defender with a 3rd party choice (Eset) for this very same reason - to wrestle some control over my OS from Microsoft. I find Defender to be overbearing in so many ways.
  - guestbest 4y ago
recursive 4y ago
The units don't make sense. You might mean megawatt-hours?
- hgomersall 4y ago
  It was not so well explained, but the GP does mean averaged over 24 hours, the power requirement is 250MW.
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  No typo, I meant Watts. I averaged the 4 hours per day
- teraflop 4y ago
  No, it makes sense. The parent is talking about continuous power measured in megawatts, i.e. megawatt-hours per hour, or megawatt-days per day. 300 million users * 4 hours/day * 5 watts = an average continuous savings of 250 MW.
  - recursive 4y ago
    Ok, I get it now. This does make sense.
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  one way it could just be mW is if he/she meant “a coal power plant for the 5 years that the bug was active”
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
You assume all Firefox users are on Windows (they're not) and that all Firefox users on Windows are affected (I and my SO were not). Who knows what edge case triggered that bug to manifest but I for one haven't seen it in the wild in the years we've been using FF. Probably difficult in such a large org to allocate dev resources to chase down and fix a bug few people were impacted by.
- callahad 4y ago
  Around 80% of Firefox users are on Windows, per https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware That same site also suggests that Firefox has around 200e6 monthly active users, the average user uses Firefox 3.5 days a week, and for 5.5 hours per day. My math could be wrong, but taking the above into account, and arnaudsm's 5 W estimate, I come up with an upper bound of around 80 MW. Discount that further by whatever proportion of Windows users you assume were actually affected. Not a whole coal power plant, but nothing to sneeze at.
  - warner25 4y ago
    Wow, that's fascinating. It really speaks to the utter dominance of Windows over Linux more than anything else. Like even among Firefox users, as of last year, there were an order-of-magnitude more Windows 7 and 8 users than Linux 5.x users.
    - jonas-w 4y ago
      Don't have any data to back this up, but I would think that the average linux user will instantly turn off firefox telemetry and won't show up on these graphs. It's one of the first things when I install firefox, disable ff telemetry, set privacy mode to strict and then install uBlock. Nevertheless Windows has a huge market share, even if no one turned off data collection, and the year of linux on desktop didn't happen.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Similar numbers can be seen with Steam demographics: Linux is nothing compared to Windows 7, to this day.
duxup 4y ago
> the equivalent of an average coal power plant Produces in an hour, four hours?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Continuous. We need one less coal plant to support the Firefox code after the bug fix.
  - akomtu 4y ago
    Coal makes only 12% of the electricity, in the US at least. Natural gas makes 36% and oil makes 33%. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
    - flangola7 4y ago
      What does that have to do with anything? "Coal plant" is being used as a unit of power here.
      - akomtu 4y ago
        And a unit of pollution. I'm sure that one extra solar plant or hydro plant wouldn't draw as much attention.
- rimunroe 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're mistaking power for energy. Watts are units of power, which is the rate of change in energy (joules per second). Asking for how much power something produces in an hour is like asking how many miles per hour your car goes in an hour.
rationalfaith 4y ago
[dead]
jonhohle 4y ago
I love calculations like this and hope they are part of every engineer’s line of thinking. I originally came across this thinking in Andy Hertzfeld’s book - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt Performance is time, energy, heat. It’s one of the easiest features to get and there are lots of tools, research, and philosophies to help get it. Memory and storage are similar. For anyone working on large scale apps that are on millions of devices, hundreds of thousands of servers, or even just some back office guy who has minutes less stress in his day, performance benefits the world. For programmers, it’s one of the easiest ways to Save the Planet™.
- harshreality 4y ago
  How did the idea of avoiding premature optimization get misapplied to client-side apps where the entity writing the software is not the one paying for electricity, cooling, and people's time when the software takes much longer to run than it could? When did a lot of software devs stop caring? Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    Premature optimization should be avoided client side as well I imagine? It just seems like lots of development shops skip optimization altogether, even when it stops being Premature (when it matures?). And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
  - aranchelk 4y ago
    I use a 7 year old low-power laptop. Cooling, electricity usage, and performance of Electron apps are never an issue. Crashes, bugs, lost data, and bad usability still are. I’d rather have devs spend time on that stuff. If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.
    - harshreality 4y ago
sdfghswe 4y ago
> let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. How did you come to this?
- mrinterweb 4y ago
  Great question. Based on my use, it would be a lot more than 5 watts/day.
- schemescape 4y ago
  Yes, the trace comparison in the link (which the author says is for browsing YouTube in Firefox) shows average CPU usage is down from roughly 5% to roughly 4%. That’s a great improvement, but I’d like to know why we should assume that translates to 5 Watts.
HPsquared 4y ago
Would be interesting to see the energy usage of Windows Update computed in a similar way.
perfmode 4y ago
user must be running windows
dist-epoch 4y ago
> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
- axolotlgod 4y ago
  Does Chrome really use significantly less resources than Firefox? Are there numbers there?
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    It took a lot longer for Firefox to get GPU accelerated video playback on Linux iirc Perhaps a "niche" use case for some, but there's a lot more Firefox users on Linux in particular
    - tristan957 4y ago
      Isn't Chromium hardware acceleration currently broken on Linux?
  - haupt 4y ago
    According to Tom's Guide[1] Microsoft Edge beats out both when it comes to RAM utilization but Chrome just edges out Firefox when loading >10 tabs. That was in 2021. I'd be interested to see any other comparisons or benchmarks. 1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-comparison https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-compa...
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      This is with no extensions installed right?
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  > Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome. Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.
marricks 4y ago
> Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug That might be a bit too kind given how much Google liked to Oops Firefox. Wouldn't be surprised if MS did too. Oops: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...
zerkten 4y ago
This is just one bug in the world affecting power usage with Firefox. There are loads more like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 which caused me to abandon it on macOS as my primary browser.
chlorion 4y ago
Gaming on a mid-tier modern GPU probably uses around 50-100w, the Steam stats probably have a number of users to multiply with. I'm sure it's a massive amount of power. I don't like video games and they are not-necessary so I propose that we ban them globally, or only allow gaming if using renewable energy. If you don't live in a place where this is an option, too bad! Maybe instead of this we require all games to be limited in graphical effect (imagine early source games or something). We could save a lot of power globally if we enforced this. This is why I strongly dislike this line of thinking. I don't think power plants work that way anyways, they probably make a constant-ish amount of power rather than taking exactly 50w worth of fuel every time someone opens up Call Of Duty. There are also much lower hanging fruit to get upset about if you care about the planet, like cars with large motors or people with heated drive ways (yes thats a thing).
- ericye16 4y ago
  This is a bad comparison, gaming presumably brings utility to someone whereas this was a pure bug with no upside.
  - chlorion 4y ago
    The bug was an accident though, not something intentional! My intention was to compare the listed things against MicroSoft engineers making mistakes while programming Windows Defender (the quote below), or programmers writing bugs in general. >Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.
- kortilla 4y ago
  People get entertainment out of games. They got nothing out of this wasted cpu.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  Now I will have to spend the rest of my life to try to forget that heated driveways are a thing and pretend everything is going to be fine
vinyl7 4y ago
I have been hoping for many years that global warming would force devs to go back to a time of creating fast and efficient software in order to help the environment. Unfortunately devs dont realize how needlessly power hungry software is when they don't need to be. But hey, its easier to use electron and javascript than it is to save the planet.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
It's 5.5 MW. That's not how power or energy works. 5 [W*hr/day] (Kept in energy units per interval rather than average power). 200e6 users/day who surf for maybe 4 hours/day 5 * 200e6 * 4 / 24 = 133 [MW*hr/day] (133/24 = 5.5 MW) A typical US home uses 11 [MW*hr/y] or 0.36 [MW*hr/day]. (Convert to power draw, that's 0.015 MW.) mean consumption of roughly 400 US homes (133 / 0.36). The smallest US grid-tied operational nuclear power plant produces 600 MW. 133 MW very small coal power plant would 400 MW. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- sesqu 4y ago
  Your math is wrong. 5W/user * 200e6 user * 4h/24h = 167 MW 11 MWh/a/home = 0.00125 MW/home 167 MW / (0.00125 MW/home) = 133 000 home
docmars 4y ago
While this feels significant, I don't think humanity is doing itself any favors by guilting itself over problems it didn't (or couldn't) anticipate. Hindsight is always 20/20. This is especially true when "don't over-optimize" is a core tenant in software development. Software would never ship in a reasonable timeframe if we scrutinized every release to this degree during development.
taeric 4y ago
Only works if this was a constant drain for everyone, though? If it only saves 100 watts once a month, from a quarter of users, things change. A lot.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
Takeaway: If you're working for a tech company with billions of users, your personal CO2 footprint is completely irrelevant. Rather than agonizing over flights vs. trains, beef vs. pork vs. vegan alternatives, heating etc. - find some small thing that you have access to and that you can optimize. That's about 2.2 TWh per year. A decent estimate for average worldwide CO2 intensity of electricity is 400 gCO2e/kWh (that's 400 tons per GWh). A typical personal footprint including some international flights will be in the tens of tons.
- MyelinatedT 4y ago
  It's worth considering that not all Wh are equal in environmental impact. In the case of many (most?) big tech firms, a large proportion of their energy consumption is sourced from renewable sources.
b3lvedere 4y ago
Imagine what could have been saved if you stop loading ads in your browser.

drumttocs8 4y ago

How are you calculating 5W? And subsequently 20Wh?

pjmlp 4y ago

If it isn't on the Sprint board it doesn't exist.

dylan604 4y ago
You also have to assume that at least one Microsoft employee has Firefox installed. There's no bug if there's no users
- sterlind 4y ago
  I work at MS, tried to use Firefox but couldn't because FF doesn't integrate with the Windows cert store. Crucially, this keeps Windows Hello (TPM auth) from working, which makes it useless for any internal websites. For a while I used a hand-compiled PKCS#12 plugin that bridged to the cert store, but that was extremely fragile and eventually I gave up. I think this is probably a major blocker for many enterprise users, and wish Mozilla would have fixed it. edit: it looks like they may have fixed this in the past couple years, though you might have to go poking around in about:config.
  - pixel16 4y ago
    Microsoft now blocks non edge browsers with conditional access policies.
  - reynoldsbd 4y ago
    Current MS employee here. For a time this was true, but FF recently added this integration. No about:config needed, there’s simply a checkbox under the FF security settings. Since this was added, I have gone back to using FF as my daily driver, and I haven’t really encountered any other friction.
    - protastus 4y ago
      Indeed. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso
  - anonymousiam 4y ago
    Firefox not integrating with the Windows cert store is actually a good thing in many use cases. The ability to have an alternate browser that's not integrated has saved my butt more than once.

cutler 4y ago

Don't underestimate Microsoft Won’t Fix which helped IE dominate the browser market for over a decade.

chillstreem 4y ago

doesn't this bug only manifest itself if one is using microsoft defender as their only security solution, and not a 3rd party AV/IS? if so, then the number of Firefox users in this calculation is much lower.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
I don't know if that's the case. I'm a Firefox user but consider all the 3rd party apps nearly as much malware as the things they are trying to solve. I run strictly defender and try to make good choices when downloading and browsing.
- chillstreem 4y ago
  well, if we're taking strictly subjective personal experiences as some sort of a relevant benchmark, then I'm a Windows Firefox user that has never used MS defender for any length of time, and always strictly a reliable low-impact 3rd party AV like ESET or Emsisoft. so I guess the two of us cancel each other out.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    So based upon rigorous analysis, approximately half of all Firefox users use the default choice, and half use a different AV.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    > strictly a reliable low-impact 3rd party AV Sounds good > like ESET What?! ESET used to burn constant CPU when wifi disconnected.
- UberFly 4y ago
  I actually replace Defender with a 3rd party choice (Eset) for this very same reason - to wrestle some control over my OS from Microsoft. I find Defender to be overbearing in so many ways.
- guestbest 4y ago

recursive 4y ago

The units don't make sense. You might mean megawatt-hours?

hgomersall 4y ago
It was not so well explained, but the GP does mean averaged over 24 hours, the power requirement is 250MW.
arnaudsm 4y ago
No typo, I meant Watts. I averaged the 4 hours per day
teraflop 4y ago
No, it makes sense. The parent is talking about continuous power measured in megawatts, i.e. megawatt-hours per hour, or megawatt-days per day. 300 million users * 4 hours/day * 5 watts = an average continuous savings of 250 MW.
- recursive 4y ago
  Ok, I get it now. This does make sense.
xdavidliu 4y ago
one way it could just be mW is if he/she meant “a coal power plant for the 5 years that the bug was active”

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

You assume all Firefox users are on Windows (they're not) and that all Firefox users on Windows are affected (I and my SO were not). Who knows what edge case triggered that bug to manifest but I for one haven't seen it in the wild in the years we've been using FF. Probably difficult in such a large org to allocate dev resources to chase down and fix a bug few people were impacted by.

callahad 4y ago
Around 80% of Firefox users are on Windows, per https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware That same site also suggests that Firefox has around 200e6 monthly active users, the average user uses Firefox 3.5 days a week, and for 5.5 hours per day. My math could be wrong, but taking the above into account, and arnaudsm's 5 W estimate, I come up with an upper bound of around 80 MW. Discount that further by whatever proportion of Windows users you assume were actually affected. Not a whole coal power plant, but nothing to sneeze at.
- warner25 4y ago
  Wow, that's fascinating. It really speaks to the utter dominance of Windows over Linux more than anything else. Like even among Firefox users, as of last year, there were an order-of-magnitude more Windows 7 and 8 users than Linux 5.x users.
  - jonas-w 4y ago
    Don't have any data to back this up, but I would think that the average linux user will instantly turn off firefox telemetry and won't show up on these graphs. It's one of the first things when I install firefox, disable ff telemetry, set privacy mode to strict and then install uBlock. Nevertheless Windows has a huge market share, even if no one turned off data collection, and the year of linux on desktop didn't happen.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Similar numbers can be seen with Steam demographics: Linux is nothing compared to Windows 7, to this day.

duxup 4y ago

> the equivalent of an average coal power plant Produces in an hour, four hours?

lordnacho 4y ago
Continuous. We need one less coal plant to support the Firefox code after the bug fix.
- akomtu 4y ago
  Coal makes only 12% of the electricity, in the US at least. Natural gas makes 36% and oil makes 33%. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
  - flangola7 4y ago
    What does that have to do with anything? "Coal plant" is being used as a unit of power here.
    - akomtu 4y ago
      And a unit of pollution. I'm sure that one extra solar plant or hydro plant wouldn't draw as much attention.
rimunroe 4y ago
I'm pretty sure you're mistaking power for energy. Watts are units of power, which is the rate of change in energy (joules per second). Asking for how much power something produces in an hour is like asking how many miles per hour your car goes in an hour.

rationalfaith 4y ago

[dead]

jonhohle 4y ago

I love calculations like this and hope they are part of every engineer’s line of thinking. I originally came across this thinking in Andy Hertzfeld’s book - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt Performance is time, energy, heat. It’s one of the easiest features to get and there are lots of tools, research, and philosophies to help get it. Memory and storage are similar. For anyone working on large scale apps that are on millions of devices, hundreds of thousands of servers, or even just some back office guy who has minutes less stress in his day, performance benefits the world. For programmers, it’s one of the easiest ways to Save the Planet™.

harshreality 4y ago
How did the idea of avoiding premature optimization get misapplied to client-side apps where the entity writing the software is not the one paying for electricity, cooling, and people's time when the software takes much longer to run than it could? When did a lot of software devs stop caring? Pardon me, I think there are some electron devs at my door asking for a word. They might have baseball bats.
- rocqua 4y ago
  Premature optimization should be avoided client side as well I imagine? It just seems like lots of development shops skip optimization altogether, even when it stops being Premature (when it matures?). And it's not like those Shops suffer for it, so it isn't very surprising they continue.
- aranchelk 4y ago
  I use a 7 year old low-power laptop. Cooling, electricity usage, and performance of Electron apps are never an issue. Crashes, bugs, lost data, and bad usability still are. I’d rather have devs spend time on that stuff. If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.
  - harshreality 4y ago

sdfghswe 4y ago

> let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. How did you come to this?

mrinterweb 4y ago
Great question. Based on my use, it would be a lot more than 5 watts/day.
schemescape 4y ago
Yes, the trace comparison in the link (which the author says is for browsing YouTube in Firefox) shows average CPU usage is down from roughly 5% to roughly 4%. That’s a great improvement, but I’d like to know why we should assume that translates to 5 Watts.

HPsquared 4y ago

Would be interesting to see the energy usage of Windows Update computed in a similar way.

perfmode 4y ago

user must be running windows

dist-epoch 4y ago

> That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug. Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.

axolotlgod 4y ago
Does Chrome really use significantly less resources than Firefox? Are there numbers there?
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  It took a lot longer for Firefox to get GPU accelerated video playback on Linux iirc Perhaps a "niche" use case for some, but there's a lot more Firefox users on Linux in particular
  - tristan957 4y ago
    Isn't Chromium hardware acceleration currently broken on Linux?
- haupt 4y ago
  According to Tom's Guide[1] Microsoft Edge beats out both when it comes to RAM utilization but Chrome just edges out Firefox when loading >10 tabs. That was in 2021. I'd be interested to see any other comparisons or benchmarks. 1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-comparison https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-compa...
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    This is with no extensions installed right?
LeoPanthera 4y ago
> Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome. Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.

marricks 4y ago

> Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug That might be a bit too kind given how much Google liked to Oops Firefox. Wouldn't be surprised if MS did too. Oops: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...

zerkten 4y ago

This is just one bug in the world affecting power usage with Firefox. There are loads more like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 which caused me to abandon it on macOS as my primary browser.

chlorion 4y ago

Gaming on a mid-tier modern GPU probably uses around 50-100w, the Steam stats probably have a number of users to multiply with. I'm sure it's a massive amount of power. I don't like video games and they are not-necessary so I propose that we ban them globally, or only allow gaming if using renewable energy. If you don't live in a place where this is an option, too bad! Maybe instead of this we require all games to be limited in graphical effect (imagine early source games or something). We could save a lot of power globally if we enforced this. This is why I strongly dislike this line of thinking. I don't think power plants work that way anyways, they probably make a constant-ish amount of power rather than taking exactly 50w worth of fuel every time someone opens up Call Of Duty. There are also much lower hanging fruit to get upset about if you care about the planet, like cars with large motors or people with heated drive ways (yes thats a thing).

ericye16 4y ago
This is a bad comparison, gaming presumably brings utility to someone whereas this was a pure bug with no upside.
- chlorion 4y ago
  The bug was an accident though, not something intentional! My intention was to compare the listed things against MicroSoft engineers making mistakes while programming Windows Defender (the quote below), or programmers writing bugs in general. >Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.
kortilla 4y ago
People get entertainment out of games. They got nothing out of this wasted cpu.
cassepipe 4y ago
Now I will have to spend the rest of my life to try to forget that heated driveways are a thing and pretend everything is going to be fine

vinyl7 4y ago

I have been hoping for many years that global warming would force devs to go back to a time of creating fast and efficient software in order to help the environment. Unfortunately devs dont realize how needlessly power hungry software is when they don't need to be. But hey, its easier to use electron and javascript than it is to save the planet.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

It's 5.5 MW. That's not how power or energy works. 5 [W*hr/day] (Kept in energy units per interval rather than average power). 200e6 users/day who surf for maybe 4 hours/day 5 * 200e6 * 4 / 24 = 133 [MW*hr/day] (133/24 = 5.5 MW) A typical US home uses 11 [MW*hr/y] or 0.36 [MW*hr/day]. (Convert to power draw, that's 0.015 MW.) mean consumption of roughly 400 US homes (133 / 0.36). The smallest US grid-tied operational nuclear power plant produces 600 MW. 133 MW very small coal power plant would 400 MW. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

sesqu 4y ago
Your math is wrong. 5W/user * 200e6 user * 4h/24h = 167 MW 11 MWh/a/home = 0.00125 MW/home 167 MW / (0.00125 MW/home) = 133 000 home

docmars 4y ago

While this feels significant, I don't think humanity is doing itself any favors by guilting itself over problems it didn't (or couldn't) anticipate. Hindsight is always 20/20. This is especially true when "don't over-optimize" is a core tenant in software development. Software would never ship in a reasonable timeframe if we scrutinized every release to this degree during development.

taeric 4y ago

Only works if this was a constant drain for everyone, though? If it only saves 100 watts once a month, from a quarter of users, things change. A lot.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

Takeaway: If you're working for a tech company with billions of users, your personal CO2 footprint is completely irrelevant. Rather than agonizing over flights vs. trains, beef vs. pork vs. vegan alternatives, heating etc. - find some small thing that you have access to and that you can optimize. That's about 2.2 TWh per year. A decent estimate for average worldwide CO2 intensity of electricity is 400 gCO2e/kWh (that's 400 tons per GWh). A typical personal footprint including some international flights will be in the tens of tons.

MyelinatedT 4y ago
It's worth considering that not all Wh are equal in environmental impact. In the case of many (most?) big tech firms, a large proportion of their energy consumption is sourced from renewable sources.

b3lvedere 4y ago

Imagine what could have been saved if you stop loading ads in your browser.