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Google Chrome Engineer Says Windows Defender 'the Only Well Behaved Antivirus', Cites 'Tons of Empirical Data' (onmsft.com)
Days after former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan said that antivirus security suites are not necessary, and AV vendors are of little help. A Google Chrome engineer has echoed the same message, reaffirming that Microsoft's built-in software is indeed the most well-behaved security suite. From a report: Apparently the disdain for 3rd party AV solutions runs deep amongst browser developers, as in response to the threads a Google engineer, Justin Schuh, had this to say: "Browser makers don't complain about Microsoft Defender because we have tons of empirical data showing that it's the only well behaved AV."
I tend to agree. I used to have third party anti-virus on the wife's machine and the kids' machine, but really the most effective malware prevention is to take away root/admin privileges altogether. Anti-virus doesn't protect against the stupidity of users. If they install malware, no anti-virus will stop them. Almost everything that the anti-virus software caught was benign and were false alarms. And despite being useless, the crap software was a resource hog.
I have since uninstalled anti-virus. I will do an occasional malware bytes scan, but have done so less and less frequently as I find little but tracking cookies.
So, yes, I agree with this report.
I have a friend who's a Windows Defender and he just goes on and on about how great Microsoft's products are. Pretty intrusive if you ask me.
I clicked on the link, get a popup asking me to disable my ad-blocker...fine. Done. Turns out the article is about a paragraph and just regurgitates some twitter garbage. Utterly useless site.
The problem is that every company other than Microsoft has a built in conflict of interest. The AV software companies profit motives are not aligned with providing a good user experience. A good anti-virus system should be nearly invisible. Hard to convince customers to pony up a lot of money for security software unless you are always in their face and an anti-malware system that does this inherently results a bad product. Worse they have to keep tacking on extra "features" and products to convince customers their product is better than the next guys. Their business model is based on scaring customers so they buy their product based on perceptions rather than actually keeping them safe.
Far too often, antivirus products follow the "cable television" market strategy:
"Yes, we know you already pay us for a subscription, but we can get so much more out of you by forcing you to see all kinds of shit you really don't want, including adverts for all our other services."
And, in the case of free antivirus, this too:
"We can see that you really dont want our full package, otherwise you would have bought it instead of opting for the free version-- but we feel compelled to try to upsell you each and every possible opportunity, and wont relent at all. We will even be really obnoxious with your notification area, and make your system play audio adverts, because that's how much we really want you to have a subscription (but see the prior market strategy-- we wont let up on the ads even if you do!)"
They invest tons of resources (both computational and time-wise) into making needlessly flashy UIs with big colorful buttons, and scary "CSI: Miami"-esque dialogs, when really--- the part that really matters-- how well they can trap execution events without bogging the system down-- seems to get nearly no love, and appears to get shittier and shittier.
Then you have Windows Defender. It's so plain, you instinctively ignore its presence. Excepting on older XP systems, (where there was a CPU utilization bug), it runs with a very modest system footprint. It does not constantly vomit spam into your system tray, and does not try to milk you for additional service agreements, or to switch to a paid version. It behaves itself very well.
If Avast or AVG behaved like that, instead of trying to be garishly tawdry and whorishly self-promoting like prostitutes, and reduced their system resource consumption habbits accordingly, they would win hands down.
But no, fleecing idiots is much more profitable.
I used to work for an AV vendor in their IT department. Others in my family have continued working in the software security industry for decades. They really are just bloated resource suckers with little value. As such, I haven't run anti-virus beyond windows defender for a little over 10 years, not even on my kids computers. They're kept up to date, ads are blocked on my network, and I have taught my kids how to recognize an executable from other kinds of files (thank god for re-enabling file extensions being shown, the stupidest Windows default of them all).
We had one virus when my daughter opened an email that gave her some nasty popups constantly. She learned a valuable lesson that day, but I was able to reverse it in less than an hour booting into safe mode and removing the files. Been fine otherwise.
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They're not glorifying effectiveness (though most testing shows they all are pretty equal now) instead they're explaining that Microsoft's solution behaves well with applications which is generally true as it's less invasive.
As a former developer of web browsers (6 years of it), I can confirm that from a developer's point of view, Microsoft hooks more cleanly into the sockets API than the other's I've used.
Don't get your panties in a bunch.