A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
That seems like a broad generalization, and for specialized software that requires newer hardware, you’d expect to find the rate of bitflips crashes much lower than 10%. You could argue that since Firefox is supported on older operating systems, longer than the support lifetime of the OS [1], it’s likely Firefox is being used specifically to get the last bit of life out of the hardware before it gets trashed.
That seems like a broad generalization, and for specialized software that requires newer hardware, you’d expect to find the rate of bitflips crashes much lower than 10%. You could argue that since Firefox is supported on older operating systems, longer than the support lifetime of the OS [1], it’s likely Firefox is being used specifically to get the last bit of life out of the hardware before it gets trashed.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/880781/mozilla-is-dropping-firefox-support-for-windows-7-and-8 ↩︎