Current Free AV situation is appaling

There used to be times when free AV's were plenty and they were actually pretty good. But today, situation is anything but that. Let me explain why for each AV...

AVG
Dreadful clumsy interface, ads on all ends, stupid "offers" and their dumb "Zen" launcher, annoying false positives that never get resolved and basically zero support. Detection improved recently, but their outer shell is so bad I can't stand it. Also, that 24 hour update cycle...

AVIRA
Still stuck in the 90's with the GUI/functions design, but they wanted to have a step with time using dreadful launcher. They have a great protection track record, but their stupid launcher and the fact their usability of AVIRA hasn't changed since HBEDV's AntiVir, I just can't stand it.

avast!
Once my love child because of amazing developer+users relationship, fantastic evolution of usability and decent protection now ruined by pretty much zero communication between devs and users, usability is going south, they are (were) using really weird messages and ads to persuade users into buying higher packages and absolutely stagnating mediocrity when it comes protection, mostly thanks to all these awesome amazing new features that end up doing nothing and protection just stays the same mediocre and forgettable. With recent weird DeepScreen behavior and almost zero response to it I basically lost all hope for it.

BitDefender Free
Once very decent option, now entirely broken under Windows 10. BitDefender team doesn't seem to be interested in maintaining it.

SOPHOS Free
While nice to see them back in action, their solution is slow, clumsy and hard to manage despite it being advertised as "simplistic". It is so simplistic it's actually hard to use it comfortably. Jumping between Windows GUI and browser is not helping the situation.

Panda Free
While having almost spotless track record in tests, their dreadful insisting on registering a Panda account is driving me nuts. And after all this time, they could integrate bloody HTTP scanning into the program instead of using stupid toolbar nonsense.

Qihoo
Typical Chinese. Nice interface, seemingly great protection but riddled with so many false positives it feels more like HIPS than antivirus. In the end I'm making decisions, not the AV engine. What's the point then? Not to mention a lot of detections are really bizarre. Once it decided all files that were once scanned by Comodo CIS that had NTFS streams attached to them were potentially harmful. And what was its solution? Delete ALL files. Luckily I've tested it on one file after doing backup and it didn't just clean the NTFS stream attached to it, it just erased the entire file. This could be all my photos, documents and projects if I wasn't suspicious about it and tested with one file first. Thanks a lot Qihoo. Thsi could have been more damaging than any malware I've encountered so far.

There are others like SecureAge Free which is great for 1 year and then you have to deal with idiotic extension by spamming people on social networks to gain points, Immunet is old, clumsy and outdated, UnThreat is outdated, Ad-Aware Free is clumsy, limited and outdated. There is also ZoneAlarm thingie, but they keep on insisting on its limited design with 24 hour update cycles. 2016 called.

To my shocking revelation, the only one that is actually worthy these days is...

Comodo
I'm not even kidding here considering my track record with Comodo. CIS 8.2, despite having some weird design decisions is actually the only security program that isn't obnoxiously annoying. It has its quirks, but they are nothing compared to all the listed above. It seems like Comodo is the only one focused on just making security software and not desperately trying to sell it to you, because they get money from elsewhere. Sure AV is a bit slow, sure whitelisting sometimes gets on my nerves, but in the end, every single test on Youtube where they just throw crap at it and it basically never gives under the weight of malware. It has no annoying ads, no stupid launchers and even though process of reporting bugs and ideas and those actually materializing is horrendous, it still feels better than with the rest above.

And with recent Comodo Cloud AV, they introduced another light alternative. It has few quirks, but it's a very new program so I'm forgiving them a bit. And it actually works pretty well despite all that.

Windows Defender
While I still hate its dreadfully slow scanning and MS still insisting on idiotic 24 hour update cycle, I have to admit that it's minimalistic interface is still charming. Zero ads and zero launcher policy already gives it an edge over pretty much entire list above and it actually made significant jumps in protection. Still lacking advanced protection features, but out of all the programs, it's actually option I've considered several times recently.

This isn't A vs B, it's the general trend I've observed and have been observing for months. It seems like once amazing selection of free AV's has been so badly thrashed around with this obsession to turn money through them that they wrecked them all. The only ones remaining normal are basically the ones where income is not directly derived from them. Comodo and Windows Defender. The rest was pretty much ruined entirely. As a security freak, this really saddens me. Entire industry kinda lost its spark if you ask me. I miss the days I was shuffling AV's almost daily lol. But today I'm just avoiding the above list and I keep on switching between Comodo and Windows Defender.

Pffffff, I just had to get this out of my system. So, anyone else observing the same?

 

I got pretty fed up with almost all of them when I was running Win 7. Mostly because of the buggy nature of all of them, with one exception. I could tolerate Avast because it seemed like a fairly clean AV (few bugs). But I have no use for all the so-called "features", so I'd just turn everything off except the file guard/protection. That was the best I could do. All the others seemed bug-ridden to me. Unreliable.... Half the time the GUI wouldn't even load for several of them. Ridiculously poor quality..