[NameNickHN]

Any AV software is better than having none but that's not the point of the article. It specifically recommends Microsoft's AV and to stay clear of all the others.

I'm sure it's hard on all the AV vendors out there but with Microsoft Essentials and Windows Defender I don't see the need for a third party AV.

[bad_user]

IMO, I think common sense, basic hygiene practices, a minimal education and a decent firewall goes a longer way, being much better than an AV could.

For example the most common way people get infected is by installing software from unreliable sources and by not keeping their computer up to date. I'm pretty sure that learning to regularly update your OS and browser, learning to search, recognize and use the official sources for software, to stop doing software piracy for that matter, learning to not click on .exe files received in emails and to be suspicious of all attachments, learning to uninstall everything that infects your browser with useless plugins, I'm pretty sure such simple knowledge would cut 99.9% of all incidents.

Most software vulnerabilities in the wild are not novel, "zero day" exploits are not that common. This is why even though I hate Microsoft's recent update policies, on the other hand I understand their newfound aggressiveness in pushing those updates, as it is really frustrating that users ignore update warnings. I also appreciate Chrome's fast updates, which encouraged Firefox to do the same.

[floatboth]

Forget even Windows Defender. The one and only "AV" a normal user will ever need is…

Google Safe Browsing.

Seriously.

Anything you download is already checked with Google, why waste CPU cycles on checking it again locally?

[nugget]

Google runs the largest advertising network in the world. Plenty of malware slips through the cracks every day, both downloadable apps/software/extensions as well as ads that lead to obvious scams. Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo etc all suffer the same problems. I think these problems are likely unavoidable at that kind of scale. But I would never rely on these companies as the only (or even primary) line of defense.

[floatboth]

Of course the primary line of defense is not running random crap executables.

[tim333]

I'd also recommend uBlock Origin or similar. The number of fake download links you see otherwise is scary.

[sp332]

You need an antivirus that can watch running programs for bad behavior. Polymorphic viruses have been around for decades and will defeat any simple blacklist. And the halting problem means you can't possibly categorize every program as being harmful or not by static analysis.

[Scea91]

One reason is that they simply do not perform as well on benchmarks. Other reason is that if there is only one AV vendor then it is a lot easier for developers of malware to penetrate systems than if there are dozens of vendors.