About the toaster ads....to me, I can live with it (while not liking it) .....as long as it does not progress to focus-stealing, always-on-top, etc.
@CharmCityCrab: While I'm no big fan of in-product ads, the forum is only a barometer of the negative response....we are not privy to Avast!'s sales records, so the upgrade prompts are probably worth it....if all it did was run customers off, with no sales, the would never try it more than once.
And while you compare Avast! to MSE, Avast! does not have the luxury of MS's big money.....if you have MSE, Redmond already got paid anyway, because you are running Windows, they get all the profit they need from that. Avast! has no such luxury.
I don't begrudge AVAST attempting to become a more financially successful company. I'm not sure that this tactic will work in the long-run, because I think they will lose a lot of the free users who recommend and install AVAST for friends and family who may eventually upgrade, in order to get a few existing users to upgrade now. It's sort of selecting short term gain at the expense of long-term gain, it seems to me. Even so, my business knowledge level is limited, and maybe I am wrong about that.
I also understand that MSE has, to some degree, an unfair advantage, because it is in a sense subsidized by Microsoft's sales of Windows and various bits of paid Microsoft software.
Having said all that, though, as an end-user, I really don't care what makes what company the most money or which company has an unfair advantage over another. I care about the product I am using and how much it costs me. Here we have two free anti-viruses, one of which has decided to behave like ad-ware and inundate me with irritating unwanted ads on a daily basis, and another that does not include any advertisements. Of course, I am going to go with the ad-free one.
No hard feelings toward AVAST, but their new way of doing things isn't one I would personally want to endure as a user unless there were no cost-free ad-free alternatives. There is one, though, so I switched to it.