After spending an entire day installing Windows updates on a friend's computer, I decided to have a bit of good geeky fun by trying out Avast anti-virus for Mac OS X. Whether Mac OS X users need anti-virus at the moment is still up in the air, but regardless of the reality of the situation, knowing our options cannot hurt.
I briefly reviewed the latest version of Norton for Mac OS X a while ago, and was, at the time, in awe at the progress Symantec had made. It was far, oh-so-far from perfect, but Norton no longer was, by any means, the "Mac destroyer" it used to be. In fact, I am still running it on one of my test computers — used daily — without any ill effect.
Avast has made a name for itself in the Windows world, and most of the clients who call upon us and run Windows, do run Avast anti-virus. I am no big fan of its pop-ups and spinning blue balls, but, all things considered, it seems to do its job pretty well. Let us not, also, forget that the home version is free, which has an uncanny appeal among certain users.
Avast for Mac, however, is not free. There is a 60 day trial available, but that is the extent of the company's generosity. When I set out to testing it, I was therefore expecting a solid, if not very polished product. After all, it was a first foray into the Mac market, but it was a paid-for application.
In this light, I am glad to report that the application has undeniably been redesigned for the Mac and no Windows-like widgets are to be seen anywhere. Unfortunately, it has been redesigned for Mac OS X v. 10.0.4, kept in a vault since then and just released.
The application's icon is nice, if not Leopard-sized, and rather Aqua-compatible. Within the main application window, however, all the controls feature big, bubbly, round icons that seem right out of a free icon pack. There is orange, there is blue, there is purple, there are varying perspectives on each button, and there even is a drawing of a Mac Pro, that is neither a Mac nor a Pro — it's actually a generic PC.
Controls are used against every single rule there is. There is no logic underlying the layout and, even after reading the online help (a print-formatted PDF document slapped within the application's bundle), I cannot understand why the scan re-nicing option (essentially a preference) is located as a button next to the scan start/stop toggle or why the preference window is larger than the main one.
I also can't quite make out why the application beachballs for 10 minutes upon launch or what the "after-close" support is. There is also a "panic mode" that is supposed to "highten sensors," although what the heightening consists of is anybody's guess.
Of course, it is not all depressing. It's also fun in places. See, Avast will scan email messages in Mail.app and use a rather clever combo of AppleScripting and mail rules to tag messages as safe or unsafe. So far, so good: extending an Apple application with an Apple-approved framework. Unfortunately, Avast engineers were bitten by an old AppleScript bug (or feature), that causes Mail to launch every single time that Avast is launched. For those of us who do not use mail, that rapidly becomes infuriating.
How does Avast actually perform? Pretty poorly, too. Real-time alerts are possible, but only when Avast itself is running, and there appears to be no way to minimize the application window or even remove the avast icon from your dock. In other words, if you want anti-virus protection, you will stare at the Avast interface all day long.
The installation also failed for me, requiring that I manually edit the application bundle based on some information gleaned on the Internet. Installer faults can happen, for sure, and I am not sure whether it is a glitch on my particular machine of with the installation script. Judging by the forum thread I read, it seems there are a few users in the same situation.
All in all, Avast did try. I am glad they tried to invest in the Mac, and they are undeniably a serious company, if their Windows software is anything to go by. The Mac version, however, appears to have been crudely outsourced to a group operating independently from anybody else. In fact, I cannot quite fathom how a company with such experience would even authorize its logo to appear on software that looks and behaves like that.
Leopard provides a lot of the hooks that anti-virus vendors need to enable a sound, baseline protection, without bells and whistles. In fact, ClamXav, which seems to be into a bit of a lull at the moment, understood this from the day it was launched and managed to outdo most commercial anti-virus options in the Tiger days. ClamXav was developped by a single man using open source software as its core.
C'mon Avast, can't we get something a smidge better? I'd be happy to rush an AppleScript Studio book to you upon simple request.
Categories
Mac
Comments (5)
Read More Entries by FJ de Kermadec.
Of course it's possible to hide the Avast user interface. It's just like hiding any other application: press Command-H. This ought to be the default behavior of the red button at the upper-left corner of the window (which instead is disabled), but it's a minor inconvenience. Go to Avast->Preferences and select "don't show automatic update-related dialogs" and you're officially unbothered by the UI.
I have to agree with this review--the trick appears to be to do a minimal install and then only scan select folders or files. As all I need this for is cleaning Word Macro Viruses (yes, I know you can do this by hand, but we have clients who need all their word files cleaned at once, not one at a time), I am willing to ignore the weird GUI. What we really need is an OSX version of Disinfect. Or ClamAV to have a cleaning option beyond quarantine.
Disinfect
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/1252
While I don't have time to give a full review of Avast@ I have found it to be an excellent antivirus program for my Mac.
It is free for the first 60 days and at the end I was sent a keycode from Avast! for a year's worth of updates and at the end of that I will receive another free year of updates and so on. It doesn't get any better than that!
-Just some random notes here: It definitely is not a resource hog and uses less than 1% of my Macs power. Nice.
-A full system scan takes less than 25 minutes on my iMac (2.8 ghz w/4GB ram).
-Having it constantly run in the background (called Persistent) meant it alerted me to a bad file I stupidly downloaded using Limewire. Caught and destroyed.
-It's easily configurable and can scan only the files you want or everything. Quick scans of my Downloads file is less than 2 minutes. Nice to use for peace of mind when I am unsure if that widget is infected or email too.
-It updates once a day for me. Or hourly if you wish.
-It is very simple to use and understand. Satisfying look and feel to it's main screen make it much more pleasurable to use (and have in the background).
This is a sweet little program and I can't believe the negative review. Yes it's free but in this case I think you get more than what you paid for :) Installation was a breeze, scans are quick, no resource hog here and it appears to be protecting my iMac.
What more could you ask for?
Frank,
Avast has many years of experience on the Windows platform, so I would expect their virus-scanning technology to be rather good. This seems to be the opinion of many reviewers on the PC side of things as well.
Judging the level of protection afforded by a particular anti-virus package, however, is a much vaster endeavor than I could, as an individual, undertake.
Indeed, beyond the engine itself, there are many other elements to take into account: how the system surveys the drive or drives it ought to, how it deals with archives and user permissions… One should also test with variants of known viruses, new viruses, etc.
My personal experience is that Avast anti-virus for the Mac is so clunky as to be unusable, which, in turn, makes it incredibly bad at catching viruses for me. That, however, is only my personal opinion for the current version of the software, and my review here was about that usability issue.
As far as the quality of the Mac anti-virus detection, especially compared to others, I fear we will have to wait for independent tests to really know. So far, our best bet is to look at the Windows lists and hope not too much was lost in translation.
Of course, if any readers are already aware of such tests for the Mac, I'll gladly welcome their input!
FJ
I have been using a Mac for about 4 years now and I decided to look into anti-virus protection against future possible threats.
Not having had to deal with viruses and anti-virus software for several years has left me a little rusty in the AV realm. Numerous PC users recommended Avast and several voiced dissatisfaction with Norton stating problems ranging from: "Resource Hog" to "System compatibility problems".
I decided to look at Avast for Mac and it has been running on my MacBook Pro for about a week. On the initial scan, it found two "Greetng Card" viruses (Windows) that came in as attachments to e-mails.
I will agree that the interface is not top notch, but I don't find it to be problematic. I did not install Avast for its great interface, I did so or virus protection. Your review fails to cover any aspect of Avast's virus protection capability. Therefore, am I to assume that it's: a) poor b) fair c) good d) outstanding?