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
You can’t effect the number of bit flips your users hardware has, but you can affect how often buggy code corrupts their memory or otherwise crashes your program.
Let’s say any app will crash about once a year on my machine due to a bit flip. If the app is crap and crashes hundreds of times for other reasons, the bit flip is irrelevant. If the app is robust enough that the bit flip accounts for 10 % of the crashes, that basically means the app is pretty much never crashing due to poor code.
You can’t effect the number of bit flips your users hardware has, but you can affect how often buggy code corrupts their memory or otherwise crashes your program.
Let’s say any app will crash about once a year on my machine due to a bit flip. If the app is crap and crashes hundreds of times for other reasons, the bit flip is irrelevant. If the app is robust enough that the bit flip accounts for 10 % of the crashes, that basically means the app is pretty much never crashing due to poor code.
That’s the way people should be looking at it. It basically means hard crashes are extremely rare in the firefox ecosystem.
To be fair, I can’t remember the last time a browser crashed on me in general.
I’ve had Safari of all things crash on me a couple of times. Still, not enough to actually be disruptive.