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 dead is justified that won’t be too surprising as a hardware is getting made less reliable these days thing. Enshitification being the norm, and tech being in everything nowadays
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 dead is justified that won’t be too surprising as a hardware is getting made less reliable these days thing. Enshitification being the norm, and tech being in everything nowadays