Does size matter??

I'm curious... Looknstop download is less than a megabyte. Outpost Firewall is over 7 megabytes, and zone alarm about 5 megabytes.
So, does the size of the program necessarily have any relationship to its power or ability to act as a strong and effective firewall?
If they all basically do the same thing, and do it basically to the same degree, then what would account for the vast difference in sizes??

 

Outpost comes with some number of plugins, ZA too I believe. They probably use some framework to create its GUI and maybe for operations as well. AFAIR, they offer additional functionalities, like anti-spam and such.
LnS seems to be a stand-alone application, without external dependecies on graphics and networking libraries (except for Win32 API of course).

LnS is robust, lightweight and focused firewall. Outpost and ZA are more like security suites (so they do not "the same thing"). That may account for their sizes.
Of course, size does not matter here. Firewall filtering quality is independent of size of its install package.
The strenghts of LnS are its small system footprint, low resources usage, (at least for some being just firewall and nothing more, advanced configuration possibilities, best system control possibilities in breed.

X.

 

No. All three are effective firewalls, but both OutPost and ZoneAlarm have additional functions, which accounts for their larger size and their greater resource/memory usage compared to LNS.

In this case, size does not matter in the ability to act as an effective firewall. But you may find that the small size of LNS, as regards its low memory footprint, is a big help on older computers.

 

thanks for the comment. of course. that does make sense. then it seems that lns is a pure and simple firewall program with few bells and whistles. that in my mind is good. and i especially like the idea of the smaller footprint on resources!

 

I'd feel much more comfortable downloading a firewall that's under 1 meg versus one that's 5-7 megs. LnS is the only lightweight, highly configurable firewall I know of that's still in development. Kerio 2.1.5 is also great for the above reasons, and what I use, but no longer supported.

When the new LnS service and driver become stable and included in a standard install, I'll give LnS a serious look.