This is a problem that Chrome has been dragging along for many years and that is especially worrying in macOS, a problem that Edge, the native Windows browser, does not offer, but that, if it has been present in Firefox, at least during the last 5 yearswhen the Mozilla Foundation, in charge of developing this browser that ensures user privacy, detected the problem.
The problem: Windows Defender
Firefox detected a problem with the consumption of Firefox resources in 2018, a problem to which they have tried to find a solution in the last 5 years without success, despite the different improvements that the browser has received in terms of performance and consumption of resources. resources. Last month, Mozilla engineers finally found the source of the problem, a source that was related to Microsoft Defender, Windows’ native antivirus.
According to the company, through the MsMpEng.exe file, high requests are made to the kernel while Firefox was running in the background, requests that overloaded processor usage slowing down the operation of the browser, even blocking for several seconds, which is why, in general, it offered a lower performance than other browsers.
This problem caused Firefox to consume up to 5 times more resources than I actually needed, especially when the number of open tabs was very high. Once the Mozilla Foundation discovered the problem, they contacted Microsoft and with the release of Windows Defender Update earlier this month, it has finally been fixed.
In fact, according to the different tests carried out by the Mozilla guys, the performance of Firefox on Windows is a top 75% to which it has offered in the last 5 years. The foundation is investigating whether this problem is also occurring in other antivirusesso it is possible that users who do not trust Microsoft’s solution as an antivirus system, may also be affected by a high consumption of resources without realizing that the problem is not in the browser, but in the antivirus software that you have installed on your computer.
Regarding the high consumption of resources that Chrome has always experienced, it is unlikely that it could also be related to Defender. This is because Google’s browser has the hateful habit of update in the background all the tabs that we have open, even if we are not using them, thus increasing the consumption of resources completely unnecessarily.
