I'm a new user, dumping an old AV application because it's become too intrusive and pushy with advertising, and there's a suspicion that it's conflicting with another app that I use a lot. So I looked around and decided 200M users can't be wrong.. and here I am. However 10 minutes into the honeymoon period Avast pops up with a 'browser cleanup' and warns me about 3 browser add-ons that have a 'very poor rating' - is that because few others use them? There have been complaints? Users don't understand them? We don't know. I think I'll keep my add-ons, but maybe sacrifice just one that I don't use much either to see where this goes..
Then the perky little Avast window informs me "Removal of poorly rated add-ons requires you to select your default browser search provider" and gives me a window from which to choose my new search provider and home page. There's a choice of Yahoo! or Bing!! There is, of course, no option to keep the choices I already made.
That's behaviour I'd expect from a cheap browser hijacker, and not from a reputedly respectable AV provider.
This post is mainly just to object to manipulation attempts like this, and provide notice that if there are any other similar tricks in the pipeline I'll be looking for another provider sooner rather than later.
I appreciate the loss of my free business isn't exactly likely to be an immediate problem, but I have a few colleagues on whom I'm about to try the story out, and I'm sure they will have colleagues too...
