Microsoft slowed down Firefox for 5 years

The Defender-Antivirus from Microsoft apparently caused the Firefox browser to perform poorly for years. The virus protection program has at Windows 10 and Windows 11 in Firefox caused a significantly increased processor load, it says in one Report from heise.de. This slowed down the browser in practice – and that 5 years lang.

Only recently Microsoft fixed the bug that was responsible for this. Firefox developers who were able to test a beta version of the new Microsoft Defender noticed that the processor load in it increased 75 percent lower was than before. Firefox is now roughly on par with Google’s Chrome browser.

Improvements for Windows users

Microsoft itself stated with the new beta version that this is a general security update and includes a critical update. There was not a word to be read in the official information about the 5-year-old Firefox error and its resolution.

The current, regular version of Microsoft Defender 1.1.20200.4 is now available. The bug is fixed there, but this is not mentioned in the changelog either. With the update, which is distributed automatically, Windows users should now use Firefox surf faster can than they are used to. In other words, more computing power is left over for other processes on the computer or notebook while surfing.