I'm a long time ESET user dating back to the Windows XP era. I have used it until Windows Defender became reliable enough, around the Windows 8 days IIRC. After a few years with defender, I found its settings lacking, and I ended up moving to Kaspersky, which I used until 2021, when I moved back to ESET.
I've been using EIS since with little trouble, but its issues can quickly become big issues once you realize why your strange computer problems are caused by ESET. I don't believe I have to focus on the positives as ESET is well known and their products are good for the most part. Instead, I will list the problems I have faced in these past two years to explain why it might be difficult to continue using ESET and to help others make an informed decision.
My gripes in chronological order:
I've been using EIS since with little trouble, but its issues can quickly become big issues once you realize why your strange computer problems are caused by ESET. I don't believe I have to focus on the positives as ESET is well known and their products are good for the most part. Instead, I will list the problems I have faced in these past two years to explain why it might be difficult to continue using ESET and to help others make an informed decision.
My gripes in chronological order:
- 2021: purchased EIS around July. A few months later, ESET announces LiveGuard, the new protection feature that mitigates never-before-seen threats. Unfortunately, it's was available only for ESET Smart Security Premium, meaning I wouldn't be able to use it unless I upgraded to the (much more expensive) ESSP, which, besides LiveGuard, has features I don't need/want;
- 2022: around April/May ESET released your typical module updates for its home products that broke Windows performance counters, causing several issues mainly with GPUs (this affected all my computers). Took ESET a while to recognize their software as the culprit, and a little longer for the fix to release. Thankfully there was a manual way to repair the damage, but some people ended up having to reinstall Windows (as per user reports on ESET forums), probably because they didn't found out how to performed the manual repairs. This same faulty module update was possibly related to broken WMI issues reported around the same time on their forums;
- 2022: on November, ESET released a new product version with many improvements, but they also introduced a controversial browser security feature that sort of isolated supported browser processes. The first problem was that browser windows now had a colored frame around them, and it couldn't be turned off unless you disable the feature entirely (this literally looked like malware had taken over your browser like in the olden IE days). This took a lot of negative feedback and time before ESET finally listened and added the option to hide that colored frame, although it still shows up over remote desktop sessions. This feature also broke copy & pasting from/to browsers for some people, and it also broke accessibility tools that became unable to interact with browsers. While most of these issues were fixed in the following months, even to this day you can find some people reporting issues. The worst offender is that this feature is now enabled by default;
- 2022/2023?: this one I'm not exactly certain when it changed since it relates to the installer. I find this sort of behavior unacceptable and it has no place on security software:
Notice how upon installation you are greeted with three checkboxes to select some features prior to installation. Now, notice how the highlighted button to continue installation ignores your choices and forces all options to enabled, regardless of your selection. This sort of forced opt-in is worse (IMO) than having all checkboxes initially ticked and requiring the user to uncheck them before continuing; - 2023: also unsure when this happened, but uninstalling ESET products now opens your default browser with a survey asking why you uninstalled (this didn't exist before);
- 2023: on August ESET finally updated their firewall GUI and added the option of configuring rules based on vendor signatures instead of application paths, among other improvements. This is great for software that updates frequently and changes its installation path each time. However, the amount of issues that arrived with firewall version 16.2 is no joking mater (some of these also affected Endpoint products);
- Previous existing rules no longer working/vanished;
- Local processes unable to communicate because the firewall is blocking everything;
- Default firewall rules missing important features like allowing DHCP assignment to network interfaces (not certain if caused by missing rules or corrupted rules due to the upgrade);
- People with LTE modems were unable to connect, causing ESET to quickly release a hotfix;
- Blocking of local network computers, possibly because the firewall interprets the WAN IPv6 address of local network devices instead of their link-local addresses on the LAN. I still have several Windows processes blocked from communicating with local computers because of this, even my DNS sometimes, despite all being on the same trusted network;
- Interactive Firewall lacking important features that existed before, like picking allowed/denied ports on the interactive window. After backlash, ESET promises these features back on version 17, which will release later this year.
- 2023: uncertain when this began, probably around June is when it became very noticeable, but it's hard to pinpoint. The issue I'm facing is that most sites, usually ones with several images (image boards, discussion forums, photo sites, etc) randomly show broken images or/and broken css layouts. Happens with any browser, and it's very, very random and hard to track the cause. Upon checking browser debug tools, some image headers are corrupted and thus unable to be rendered by the browser (Firefox reports ns_error_net_partial_transfer). Refreshing the page fixes it, then it happens again on a different page or on the same page five minutes or five hours later, every day, for months. I always imagined it had something to do with my ISP or DNS or browser or router or whatever, because it's very random, thus hard to identify the source. This happens on at least two computers that I have tested, both with EIS, on two different ISPs.
And then last week somebody on the ESET forums reported the same issue with their web application not working properly due to ESET corrupting gzip headers when SSL/TLS scanning is enabled. Turns out, this is a reported issue since at least 2016. So, just for the sake of testing it out, I've uninstalled EIS, installed Kaspersky, and for the past five days I've not faced this issue at all. I'm still monitoring that thread to see if something is said about this issue, so I guess we will see.
