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
It would be interesting to see how this works in Chrome. I would guess that it could be the same - people tend to leave their browsers open with hundreds of tabs and will never reboot their laptops. If you play a random game for 2 hours, bit flips shouldn’t be a problem. But if you keep your browser open for weeks or months with hundreds of tabs, that may cause problems.
… I can’t imagine having a browser with hundreds of open tabs. That would tend me of the old days of Netscape Navigator and all the popups and browser add on cancer.
Ahh the nostalgic days of the early Dotcom era. I sometimes miss you geocities
Wouldn’t that mean ten percent of all crashes in all apps would be caused by bit flips? What makes Firefox special?
It would be interesting to see how this works in Chrome. I would guess that it could be the same - people tend to leave their browsers open with hundreds of tabs and will never reboot their laptops. If you play a random game for 2 hours, bit flips shouldn’t be a problem. But if you keep your browser open for weeks or months with hundreds of tabs, that may cause problems.
… I can’t imagine having a browser with hundreds of open tabs. That would tend me of the old days of Netscape Navigator and all the popups and browser add on cancer.
Ahh the nostalgic days of the early Dotcom era. I sometimes miss you geocities