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
Interesting metrics to measure, but since I have no reference to how many crashes are caused by bitflips in any other software, it’s really hard to say if Firefox is super stable or super flaky.
Interesting metrics to measure, but since I have no reference to how many crashes are caused by bitflips in any other software, it’s really hard to say if Firefox is super stable or super flaky.