[squeaky-clean]

> who don't know what they are doing.

I think this would describe the majority of computer users. And the majority of computer users are also using Windows.

> I haven't needed any form of active virus scanning in something like 15 years

Microsoft Defender antivirus was released alongside Windows 8 in 2012. And it's essentially a rewrite of Microsoft Security Essentials which came included starting with Vista. If you haven't been explicitly disabling it, which your comment sounds like, you've been running one without knowing it for 16 years

[Dalewyn]

>Microsoft Defender antivirus was released alongside Windows 8 in 2012. And it's essentially a rewrite of Microsoft Security Essentials which came included starting with Vista.

Not quite.

Windows Defender was released together with Windows Vista, this was very rudimentary and only handled malware and spyware not unlike Malwarebytes, it did not handle viruses.

Microsoft Security Essentials was released standalone sometime during Windows 7's era, this was fully fledged anti-virus.

Microsoft Security Essentials was renamed Microsoft Defender and bundled with Windows starting from Windows 8, where it has stayed to this day.

[srj]

The guts are the same across these systems (defender, mse, forefront, etc). They use the same engine but it used to be defender only received antispyware signatures. There are some features on top but basically these are just wrappers around the same platform.

The original team that worked on this was awesome but a bunch of bad managers came over from Exchange and ruined it.

source: worked on this several years ago

[squeaky-clean]

You're right I was wrong about MSE which was the Windows 7 era. But Windows Defender was released in 2005 and was a rebrand of Microsoft AntiSpyware, which itself was a rebrand of GIANT AntiSpyware.

The version of Windows Defender that came with Vista was a bit different and included realtime scanning when executables were run.

[olyjohn]

They bought out the best AV product on the market, and initially it was amazing. They even improved on it at first, but then it started aging into the turd they is now Defender.