Serious Discussion I Tried Every Free Antivirus Software and for Me Microsoft Defender Give Me the Fastest Browsing Experience, Do You Feel the Same?

SpiderWeb

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Defender enjoys system integration which gives it better access to resources that are only meant for system processes. No 3rd party can beat that and that's why they will always be slower. But, there are very efficient AVs that close in on the gap and I think if you believe that the benefits outweigh the costs, it might be worth it.
 

Nevi

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I tried every free antivirus software and for me Microsoft Defender give me the fastest browsing experience, do you feel the same?
I admit I don't really know the free scene. Have you tried Kaspersky free cloud based antivirus up against MD? I know for many people MD is a good antivirus, but I don't like it. On my computers they get a heavy butt with MD. Compared with Eset there is really difference, and not to MD benefit. If you can live with MD more power to you.
 

lokamoka820

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Mar 1, 2024
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I admit I don't really know the free scene. Have you tried Kaspersky free cloud based antivirus up against MD? I know for many people MD is a good antivirus, but I don't like it. On my computers they get a heavy butt with MD. Compared with Eset there is really difference, and not to MD benefit. If you can live with MD more power to you.
I don't like MD too for a simple reason, that it made by Microsoft, I am always looking for an alternatives to Microsoft apps because they change it to fit the company profit over user comfort, and that happens with edge browser, it starts as a superfast light browser to become more bloated with every update, and ask you to reset search engine and to make edge the default browser whenever I open it, and Microsoft PC Manager (I don't use it by the way) with last update it show a warning if Bing is not the default search engine.

Kaspersky free is light on resources but it has the slowest browsing experience and AV-TEST results show that it is always over the industry average in Slowing-down when launching popular websites in Performance section.

I don't have problems with MD now, but I think it is a matter of time until it will detect that changing the default browser or search engine as a severe thread. :)
 
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Andy Ful

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I love it when Edge shows a nag that tries to convince the user to change the settings. I can see that lovely nag after some updates. This is also a great security improvement for my mum (better than HTTPS scanning). She does not browse the Internet until I kill the nag (she is happily 91 years old). :)
 

SeriousHoax

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I tried every free antivirus software and for me Microsoft Defender give me the fastest browsing experience, do you feel the same?
Of course. This would be everyone's experience. Browsing speed is faster with Microsoft Defender because it doesn't filter web traffic. Browsing and downloading speed will have no impact with Microsoft Defender. I would say the same is true for gaming also. It has performance impact on some other areas though.
 

mlnevese

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I tested quite a few products on my computers after my Kaspersky license ended. Some had noticeable impact not only in browsing but general system speed. Others had a difference in the milliseconds range no human would notice. Like any other aspect of security software, it all depends on a lot of factors, so I won't recommend any product. If it's just your personal computer, just take some time and actually test them. You may be surprised by the results you get.
 

CyberDevil

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Honestly I don't notice any browser speed issues at all with Eset scanning all HTTPS traffic and even QUIC since the latest version. But HTTPS scanning allows me to block malware load on the whole system, I even block ads in Overwolf (overlay browser for gamers) through Eset and have all security features in it at the same time. Extensions don't have that much credibility for me.

Although maybe Eset has less of a performance impact since it has a list of trusted certificates and sites or something. For example, here I see MalwareTips own certificate, not a spoofed one from Eset.
 

SeriousHoax

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For example, here I see MalwareTips own certificate, not a spoofed one from Eset.
I saw that in Chromium browsers ESET don't do HTTPS scanning for many sites that uses QUIC/HTTP3. MalwareTips is one of them. I also saw it downgrading some HTTP/3 sites to HTTP/2. It seems ESET has to downgrade HTTP/3 supported sites to HTTP/2 to do the HTTPS scanning.
Kaspersky downgrades every HTTP/3 to HTTP/2 even if you disable their HTTPS scanning/encrypted scanning (Not a fan of this). HTTP/3 is simply not allowed at all when you install Kaspersky.
Only Avast can properly filter HTTP/3 and they have been doing this for a while (the first one to do so AFAIK).
 

CyberDevil

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Apr 4, 2021
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It seems ESET has to downgrade HTTP/3 supported sites to HTTP/2 to do the HTTPS scanning.
I could be wrong, but it's more of a Site -> QUIC -> Eset -> HTTPSv2 -> browser type scheme rather than a downgrade. Just Eset give the browser content locally already in https2. In general it doesn't decrease security or affect speed, since it already happens on the computer when the content is downloaded.
 

RoboMan

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Fun fact: Windows Defender for Endpoint does include a sort of "web filtering", which works by leveraging Windows Defender SmartScreen (for Microsoft Edge) and Network protection (for Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Opera). Home users, on the other hand, have no such option. They have some basic protection, which warns about suspicious sites in Microsoft Edge, and relies on browser extensions for other browsers.
 

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