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
LOL, nah, Firefox isn’t that stable. If 10% of crashes were caused by bad RAM, it means 90% were still caused by something else.
(My install regularly gets a memory leak that eventually makes my system unusable, BTW. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of Firefox itself – more likely Javascript running in tabs, maybe interacting with an extension or something, and some of the blame goes to the kernel’s poor handling of low memory conditions – but it’s definitely not “dev humblebrag stable” for me.)
10% of all crashes is definitively a brag. Crashes due to faulty hardware/bitflips is rare rare, generally I would expect that percentage to be less than 1% in any complex app
LOL, nah, Firefox isn’t that stable. If 10% of crashes were caused by bad RAM, it means 90% were still caused by something else.
(My install regularly gets a memory leak that eventually makes my system unusable, BTW. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of Firefox itself – more likely Javascript running in tabs, maybe interacting with an extension or something, and some of the blame goes to the kernel’s poor handling of low memory conditions – but it’s definitely not “dev humblebrag stable” for me.)
10% of all crashes is definitively a brag. Crashes due to faulty hardware/bitflips is rare rare, generally I would expect that percentage to be less than 1% in any complex app