Finding a flaw in Windows Defender is not news, but that Microsoft It took me five years to solve one that I already knew It is certainly worth mentioning. As many of our readers will already know, errors and failures are common in the world of software, and these can not only be more or less serious, but they can also have a different impact depending on their own particularities.
We will understand it better with an example. Imagine that Microsoft finds a bug in Windows Defender that occurs when using the Chrome browser. As this browser is the most used, its scope would be very great, and therefore, even if it is a small problem, the Redmond giant would have reason to hurry when it comes to solving it.
Now let’s think about that same example, but with a browser that has a very small user base, Firefox. In this case, it is clear that its impact would be lessand that Microsoft could take it much more calmly, because it would affect a much smaller number of users than in the previous case.
Well, that is precisely what has happened with a bug that Microsoft identified five years ago in Windows Defender, and that generated high CPU consumption when using the Mozilla Firefox browser. This problem has been active for half a decade, and today we can finally confirm that it has been fully resolved thanks to the joint efforts of the Microsoft and Mozilla development teams.
The solution will be implemented in a Integrated update to new Windows Defender definitionsand that therefore will be independent of the updates at the operating system level that Microsoft periodically releases for Windows 10 and Windows 11. This update will also reach Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, two operating systems that no longer have official support from Microsoft , and that in theory they should not suffer this failure.
Regarding dates, I can confirm that the update deployment took place on April 4, so It should be generally available by now. This is a very important update for everyone who uses Firefox on Windows with the Microsoft security suite, because this bug caused the browser to offered a rather poor performance and that the response times were very slow even in tasks as simple as browsing different websites and reloading or changing pages.