We probably need to start a ne thread on this
(And frankly, time to jump the antivirus ship altogether. All this stuff does more harm than good. Just look at the latest Symantec fiasco.)
I'm not sure I disagree here. I followed the Twitter link quite aways in, and things were definitely getting murky. I don't have the expertise to make any useful contribution beyond asking people to have a think, but I do consider that too many apps (including Avast!) have become bloated with "extras". Take a good look at Symantec and MacAfee to see what I mean.
I have always had the philosophy of
"The [purpose], the whole [purpose] and nothing but the [purpose]." I threw out Netscape Communicator, Opera, oh, half a dozen "programs became suites" because they wound up doing nothing well and everything badly. And while I'm not (yet) about to abandon Avast, I must make it clear that a rethink is badly needed in the construction of this anti-malware suite.
Tavis Ormandy does make the point that many of the unwanted options in many "suites" are only disabled, but they are still installed. I assume that's because the suite winds up as a monolith rather than a modular assembly. Certainly I saw no evidence that Opera did not install the bits that I didn't want and unticked.
I repeat, I'm not about to abandon Avast. Apart from anything else, I'd have to learn a complete new ecosystem, and then find the outcome is not that different to Avast anyway. But, devs, please make some effort to bring Avast back to its core function: killing malware: viruses, worms and trojans. Really,
nothing else matters. And my personal experience from too many years ago is that modular assemblies, where unwanted parts are never installed, present far fewer headaches.
Gordon.
