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
Hmm thanks, also please massively digress if you would like to.
I interpreted it like 10% is a lot if it’s 10% of a million. That 100,000. So if there’s a million things that crash Firefox that’s a high number.
If Firefox only crashes 10 times a year because it runs that well, 10% or that 1 time it crashes from a bitflip is impressive that the rare bitflip takes up such a high percentage of total crashes because Firefox just doesn’t crash very often.
If your dread is found to be justified that won’t be too surprising, to me, if hardware is getting made less reliable these days thing. Enshitification being the norm, and tech being in everything nowadays
We obviously need more context from Mozilla, but this could be a canary in the mine type situation.
But it would be kind of neat if Firefox became something of a reliable test for bitflipping unintentionally
Hmm thanks, also please massively digress if you would like to.
I interpreted it like 10% is a lot if it’s 10% of a million. That 100,000. So if there’s a million things that crash Firefox that’s a high number.
If Firefox only crashes 10 times a year because it runs that well, 10% or that 1 time it crashes from a bitflip is impressive that the rare bitflip takes up such a high percentage of total crashes because Firefox just doesn’t crash very often.
If your dread is found to be justified that won’t be too surprising, to me, if hardware is getting made less reliable these days thing. Enshitification being the norm, and tech being in everything nowadays
We obviously need more context from Mozilla, but this could be a canary in the mine type situation.
But it would be kind of neat if Firefox became something of a reliable test for bitflipping unintentionally