You Don't Need an Antivirus (Except Microsoft's Built-in on Windows), Says Former Firefox Developer (ocallahan.org)

Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan believes that antivirus software is not necessary, AV vendors are of little help, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately. From a blog post: Users have been fooled into associating AV vendors with security and you don't want AV vendors bad-mouthing your product. AV software is broadly installed and when it breaks your product, you need the cooperation of AV vendors to fix it. (You can't tell users to turn off AV software because if anything bad were to happen that the AV software might have prevented, you'll catch the blame.) When your product crashes on startup due to AV interference, users blame your product, not AV. Worse still, if they make your product incredibly slow and bloated, users just think that's how your product is.

Comments

The average user still needs AV

[entropy01]

I don't use AV, but the average person still needs it. The average person either doesn't know or doesn't care what they are clicking on. As part of a layered defense strategy for the average user, it is still needed. Personally, I don't like AV stealing my CPU cycles. I use other methods, common sense chief amongst them, to prevent infection.

I agree with the summary

[DatbeDank]

Let's be real with ourselves. Nowadays the vectors for attack are easily protected so long as you use a modern browser that sandboxes itself and use an ad blocker you really don't need anything more than the built in AV and firewall tools for windows. I don't even think OSX provides an AV tool.

I haven't paid for antivirus software since 2005 which was coincidentally when I discovered Firefox and Adblocking extension.

I'll stick with the free tools.

You're credible why?

[zifn4b]

And we should trust the developer of a browser whose development team didn't see the problem with their memory model chewing up resources until Firefox ground to halt and took an ivory tower position of something along the lines of "you shouldn't have your browser open that long." I know quite a few people who switched to Chrome over that nonsense, myself included. Why should we trust your recommendations again?