Am I correct to say that the best free firewall is ZoneAlarm ? I was checking reviews on download.com and came to conclusion that the most popular is indeed ZA. Comodo and netveda are close behind. Can anybody could confirm ZA as the best protection against hackers and spyware ? Or there are better ones ? Thank you!
I used ZA free for years and have to say it's light on resources and stable as well as being easy to use. As for being 'the best' - that's a moot point- I'd say depends on how configurable you want your firewall to be and the amount of time you want to spend setting it up. My experience is ZA free works straight out of the box and is very easy to understand but Jetico, Netveda and Comodo are all 'better' in terms of the the protection they offer but are not so easy to use. I have to say I moved on to Look 'n' Stop (a pay for firewall) after trying all of the above because it's light and stable and I like its rule-based nature best but I'd suggest you trial ZA free against say Comodo to see which suits you.
ZA does its job without much fanfare right out of the box, to most PC users, thats what they need, an unobtrusive firewall and ZA and ZAP fit that bill perfectly.
The free version of zonealarm is pretty good for the average user. Its quite easy to use and works well. One thing i'm not too sure on tho is the latest free version compared to the older free versions. They seem to be pretty similar from what i can see and if thats the case then a person would be better off using an older version as they seem to have less bugs and use less resources.
I know about mant of the complaints about ZA. I have used both the Free and Pro version for years, early 4.X, to the most current. Have the most recent ZASS on my laptop. In all honesty the only trouble I ever had was with the, I believe first 6.XX release. Come to find out it was due to me having altered my Win2k boot screen. Sense then I have had 0 problems. I guess "easy" can mean a lot of things to different people. Any where from resource usage to ease of configuration to the amount of User interaction required, to last but not least actual security provided. As was stated above, IMO, ZA is the easiest to use right out of the box. As far as over all security any of the above work well. To my knowledge, none of them have ever been breeched. So in that aspect they are all good and do their job. Having said that, and being a firm believer in layered security, I will never run my 3 PC network again without both a NAT router and software firewall, wether it be a single PC or my usual 3 machine network plus the occasional Customers PC.
Although you can't see anything visible change, it does not mean that nothing has not changed under the hood. ZL tends to fix vulnerbilities silently unless someone else has discovered it before ZL does and releases the details to the public.
Zone Alarm is the most popular free firewall based on its long history of development and that it was free. This does not imply that it is the best bulwark against spyware and hackers. While it is considered to be a very solid firewall and is not easily disabled by malware, that does not mean that you will never get any with using the program. I don't know the protection comparison of ZA with the competitors (the free version did not do too well on the leak tests), but I guess since it was offered for free many years ago, a lot of people use it (I have it on a machine that I got back in 1999). Had they offered the program like what was done to the Netscape browser by AOL, virtually nobody would be using the program now.
What about Comodo v2. I do not use it but from what I have read about the application it may just give ZA Free a run for its money, especially if one likes to tweak the settings.
definetly yes,lesser prompts,blocks all ports,if you have pro version it has a os-firewall which also does a good job. Well,yes,many people do have probs with ZA,but that doesn't make it a bad firewall. If that was criteria than kaspersky wouldn't be considered one of the best AV around...
Only issue with Sygate is if you use a local proxy (like Proxomitron) as Paranoid2000 mentions here: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=528089#post528089
