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

Firefox is slow and bloated.

[Spazmania]

I don't run any antivirus software on my PC. I still have to kill firefox a couple times a day because it's "not responding" for five minutes or more doing some kind of background task across the 3 gigs of ram it's consuming.

You're not wrong about Antivirus software (your reasons are precisely why I don't have any installed) but that's no excuse for Firefox's poor code quality.