back to article Avira antivirus patched but still not fully Windows 8 ready

Avira has rolled out a patch that makes its popular freebie anti-virus software more compatible with Windows 8. Earlier this month the German firm admitted its products were not yet compatible with Windows 8 after users complained that attempting to run Avira's software on Microsoft's latest operating system results in the …

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  1. JDX Gold badge

    How have MS' own security tools (Firewall and MSE) fared in W8/2012? Presumably they also needed rewriting?

    1. Piro Silver badge

      MSE

      Has been rolled into Windows. It comes with it. By default.

      1. JDX Gold badge

        Re: MSE

        Yes I know. It was part of W7 too. But that wasn't my question - on W7 MSE is pretty good but is that still the case in W8?

    2. Ryan Spooner

      MSE has been rolled into Windows Defender and is now included out of the box with Windows 8. If you used MSE before, there now no need to download a separate AV product on the new platform.

  2. Ilgaz

    No AV vendor has guts to say it

    If there are such radical changes, why nobody questions the lack of a proper, documented security sdk& API which will stop the need to code horrible hacks?

    Like defrag API coded after similar nightmare happening in windows 98. They designed (actually another company) something that will cover all needs by defragmenters, everyone plugged in.

    Actually, EU can ask them. Why compete instead of provide something that is expected from a vendor?

    Even Apple provides something close, fsevents takes most of the need to inject self to kernel.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: No AV vendor has guts to say it

      IIRC, MS tried to force the A/V vendors to go via the APIs in 7, cutting off the ability to dive onto the metal, shove in their own low-level I/O drivers and subvert the O/S completely.

      The A/V types threatened legal action and they were forced to back down.

      Swings and roundabouts. If they were to do it, on the plus side an A/V fuckup wouldn't bluescreen the O/S. On the minus side, pwning the O/S could easily foil A/V scanning and checks by merely being a bit choosy about what the APIs present....

  3. Skoorb
    Unhappy

    I've seen this happen before.

    A rather well liked (by customers) anti-virus firm did this with Windows 7 SP1.

    Any ESET product didn't work with SP1 (at all, as in total crash), and there were loads of customers, both companies and individuals, trying to file support requests and bug reports from the first preview. Eset's response was "we don't support pre-release software". Everyone had to wait for the thing to hit general availability before Eset would open a bug (and everyone who tried to install SP1 going mental). Cue a heck of a lot of scrambling around by them to get a fix out - took them two weeks and then they had to improve that later.

    So, I'm guessing this was another "we refuse to test against anything that hasn't hit general availability yet" policy.

    Not good.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I've seen this happen before.

      If windows were open source rather than some mysterious black box then software vendors would be able to fully test what is going on rather than having to rely on MS's scant API details.

      1. Ryan Spooner

        Or, you know... they could get off their lazy arses and test their products against the early builds of new OSes. One of hte main reasons Microsoft releases early versions. Then if it doesn't work or causes major crashes, they could block their products from being installed onto those OSes until they were ready. Instead of keeping quiet, letting customers try the software, and then have angry customers with dead machines.

  4. BillG
    FAIL

    Blame Avira

    > Independent testing lab AV-Test.org reports that the vast majority of anti-virus vendors in the market already offer Windows 8-compatible products to consumers.

    If Avira's products gave a BSOD on Windows 8, then why didn't Avira's installation program prevent install on Windows 8?

    According to Avira's forum, Avira's quality has declined after Avira 2010. Starting with Avira 2012 serving pop-up ads to the desktop (this is the PAID version) and config panel options not working, Instead of features, they provide excuses.

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