Microsoft’s own built-in antivirus in its operating systems is quite well-regarded in the industry. But it doesn’t always work as it should, or at least it can negatively affect system performance. The company, after five years, corrected a Windows Defender issue which caused problems in Firefox browser.
Perhaps one of the best features of Windows 10 and later is its antivirus. The company integrates it at no additional cost and in various security audits, it is always the best rated or is one of the five best rated. But, its cost in terms of system performance can be significant.
Microsoft still uses Internet Explorer, it seems
Mozilla Firefox browser users were experiencing slowdowns while using this software. Specifically, the problem was in the function “antimalware service executable” The windows. Said element has to do with Defend and supposes a excessive usage up to 30% on CPU.
To use Firefox and Windows Defender in parallel, the two tools collided. This problem ended last week, after five years. Thanks to the patch, the Defender component “MsMpEng.ese” is fixed, which reduces CPU usage by up to 75%.
Microsoft and Mozilla developers worked together to fix the problem. Also, one of the engineers from the browser development team provided some data in this regard. Specifically, we’re talking about Yannis Juglaret, who provided data through Mozilla’s Bugzilla monitoring system.
You can read online that Defender was making too many calls to VirtualProtect, and overall CPU usage will now drop by 75% when browsing with Firefox. This is absolutely false! The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on the real-time protection feature of Microsoft Defender (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume significantly less CPU than before by monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program via Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Nothing less, nothing more
Yannis Juglaret
Note that Juglaret indicates that the performance of Firefox could still be further optimized. It highlights that CPU usage can be further reduced, but in this case with any antivirus and not just Defender.
Within Reddit, quite satisfying reports have been posted by different users. This is very good because these users will have a better experience.
Constant CPU usage by Defender
Microsoft’s idea with this antimalware is to protect users without having to depend on third parties. A great idea that is executed in this way. The background, idle usage of this software is quite high and affects the overall performance.
If you access the Task Manager and find the process Antimalware service executable, you will see how the CPU usage fluctuates between 0.2 and 1%. Moreover, this process usually consumes between 200 and 500 MB of RAM. The reason for this consumption is active system protection, something necessary while we are browsing, but which also occurs when we do not have an active browser.
