Of course, finding and comparing all the attributes one is looking for in an ativirus is something else. Thus, I had to dig deep in order to get a good look around but after doing so I was left with quite a few surprise results:

Norman AV: the mighty grandson of the famous Thunderbyte Antivirus is less than mediocre. It’s slow and although it has a fair detection rate, I can’t imagine the home user that would like to hog down his machine using this … thing

Symantec Antivirus: although I have a personal resentment versus this product, which used to be slow and give a lot of false-positives, I must say that things have improved here. However, I still won’t be using it.

ESET NOD32: this has always been a favorite of mine. However, I find that the price is a bit expensive and although the last time I tried it, it looked like a good and snappy piece of software, the latest tests show it to be just of average speed (although with a very very impressive detection rate)

Kaspersky AV: brilliant detection rates, however it’s quite heavy on resources. It has very good heuristics and healing capabilities and as a bonus it is backed by one of the best antivirus labs in the world. Still, it comes second to my preferences.

BitDefender: It would be great if it wasn’t one of the slowest antivirus software. Lot of options, great detection rates … but still. Often hanged my computer, so … no!

Avira!: A nice surprise comes from here, with the best overal detection rates (the best in on-demand scanning and third best in proactive protection). Very snappy and cheap on resources … with a very good price. My choice for now.

Microsoft Security Essentials: Microsoft has an incredibly poor security record as a company, a record that it’s Defender software packed with Windows didn’t do much to help. However, it seems that the acquisition of GeCad’s antivirus division has finally payed off as Microsoft Security Essentials is a little gem of an antivirus. Quite snappy and very good detection rates (best in proactive defense, not so good in on-demand).

For more details, please check this out!

Internet Explorer 6′s aging engine allowed Firefox and Opera to gain momentum while Windows Vista provided a kick for Apple OS X and Linux Ubuntu, the first one gaining 2% market share, jumping from 3% to 5% and well beyond.

Why do I say Microsoft’s campaign is poor? Simply because their way of getting the information distorted and against the very things users see when using the competition’s products. Let’s take the table presented by Microsoft and look through the competition:

1. Security: only IE8 gets a check for … what? Firefox and Chrome have behind them the Google search engine which scans sites and offers a huge database of “evil” sites. Chrome in particular has a great detection (sure, the version is now 4). From my experience IE8 allowed me to visit a phishing site, while Firefox warned me and Chrome downright didn’t let me go there.

2. Privacy: Sure IE8 allows for private browsing, but so does Firefox. Chrome can do that too, but both IE8 and Firefox have the option one click away while in Chrome it’s well hidden.

3. Ease of use: IE8 claims victory! Are you kidding me? The accelerators are the most annoying thing I’ve ever encountered, with the exception of Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 has come a long way, but it’s just in line with the others (if you disable those ‘features’).

4. Web Standards: IE8 isn’t better, not at all. How can IE8 claim to have invested heavily in CSS 2.1 support when it utterly fails the Acid3 test?? Seriously now, IE8 is the poorest, with 20%.

5. Developer Tools: First of all, Chrome also brings some to the game. Second, what IE8 has barely compares to what Firefox has. Throw in Firebug and IE8 has nothing.

6. Reliability: Chrome has both and it is outstanding. Each tab is a process. IE8 doesn’t have that isolation. Well, it tries to, as it can detect and close the offending tab itself, but that detection isn’t 100% accurate and does not apply when the core process fails, case in which there’s no isolation and no recovery. In Chrome all processes are independent and even when closing the initial process, the rest of the tabs remain. Firefox doesn’t have isolation, that’s true, but it has outstanding recovery. Here Chrome is the real winner.

7. Customizability: is this even a word?! First of all, how can you say that Internet Explorer 8 is customizable if it has everything right out of the box. And actually there’s a lot IE8 doesn’t have right out of the box, like an ebay tool for example. All it has are the annoying “accelerators”.

8. Manageability: what the hell are “enterprise tools” in a browser? And guidance to … what? For those unfamiliar with browsers there’s a very well written help section (especially for Chrome). Not to mention I have used IE8 for quite a while since I skipped on to Windows 7 and I haven’t see any of the “guidance” or “enterprise tools”.

9. Performance: it’s not a tie, not by a longshot. Sure, they’re right, the greatest limitation to browsing is your internet connection but there’s still a big difference once the page i ready to be rendered and rendering engines do make quite a difference. OK, it may not be relevant for 75% of the people (if it were, Microsoft would’ve been out of business a long time ago) but it’s there and it’s noticeable (see my browser speed tests – I didn’t devise the tests but I did run them and tried to keep some statistics). Of course, Microsoft does cover its weak points in the blanket of “irrelevance”.