Microsoft’s own and integrated antivirus in its operating systems is quite well valued in the industry. But, it doesn’t always work as it should, or at least it can negatively affect system performance. The company, after five years, has corrected a windows defender problem which caused problems in Firefox browser.
Possibly one of the best features of Windows 10 and later is its antivirus. The company integrates it at no additional cost and in different security audits, it is always the best rated or is among the five best rated. But, its cost in system performance can be significant.
Microsoft is still using Internet Explorer, it seems
Users with the Mozilla Firefox browser were experiencing slowdowns when using this software. Specifically, the problem was in the function “antimalware service executable» Windows. Said element has to do with Defend and supposes a excessive use of up to 30% on the processor.
Use Firefox and Windows Defender in parallel caused both tools to collide. This problem ended last week, after five years. Thanks to the fix, the Defender component “MsMpEng.ese” is corrected, which reduces processor usage by up to 75%.
Developers from Microsoft and Mozilla have collaborated to correct the problem. In addition, one of the engineers from the browser’s development team has given data in this regard. Specifically, we are talking about Yannis Juglaret, who has provided data through Mozilla’s Bugzilla monitoring system.
You can read online that Defender was making too many calls to VirtualProtect, and overall CPU usage will now drop by 75% when browsing with Firefox. This is absolutely wrong! The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on the Microsoft Defender real-time protection feature (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume much less CPU than before by monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program via Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Nothing less, nothing more
Yannis Juglaret
It should be noted that Juglaret indicates that Firefox performance could still be further optimized. It highlights that the use of the processor can be further reduced, but in this case, with any antivirus and not only with Defender.
Within Reddit, quite satisfactory reports have been published by different users. This is great as these users will get a better experience.
Constant CPU usage by Defender
Microsoft’s idea with this antimalware is to protect users without having to depend on third parties. A great idea that is executed in those ways. The background, idle usage of this software is quite high and affects overall performance.
If you access the Task Manager and look for the process Antimalware Service Executable, you will see how the CPU usage oscillates between 0.2-1%. In addition, this process usually consumes between 200-500 MB of RAM. The reason for this consumption is the active protection of the system, something necessary while we are browsing, but which also occurs when we do not have any active browser.
