Has Online Armor Firewall been discontinued?

Without knowing anything about what Christian or Fabian has said in the past, it appears like it has been abandoned due to the lack of development. Can't someone form an opinion based on this? How is this accusing someone of lying?

 

I also remember reading this:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thre...ware-8-1-released.352133/page-10#post-2337088

Since none of us know the sales numbers of Online Armor, there is no way for us to know if the money is there to support the development.

 

Which part of my post that implicitly or explicitly said that Christian Mairoll and Fabian Wosar are lying? You just took a conclusion all by yourself. I didn't say they lie, what I was truly saying that you seem to have missed, is that there is not enough people to support the developing cost for OA, and it's completely normal for a company to discontinue products which don't have bright enough future. The reality is, not many people will buy/have bought licenses for OA to support its future development, and by the look of how they advertise OA in their website, it will just get harder for OA to penetrate the market. Honestly, for a moderator you're too butt. Yeah, I don't care if I'm doing ad hominem mode and going frontal to a forum staff. >=V

 

Christian Mairoll - CEO, CTO

founder and owner of Emsisoft

 

It has already been posted, but our stance hasn't changed: As long as Online Armor continues to pay for its development we won't discontinue it. There also have been plenty of updates to the Online Armor backend systems over the past year. Those may not be obvious, as we rarely announce such changes, but if you use or test Online Armor a lot, you will have noticed that online lookups are a lot quicker and known good and bad applications are picked up a lot faster and more accurate compared to a year ago for example.

 

Two things that will be more than sufficient enough to drive people away from buying a license for OA:
1. Program version 7.0.0.1866 released on October 15th, 2013
2. "For geeks only" marketing

Thus, OA won't get enough support to still stand, and to be very honest, I won't blame Emsisoft at all if one day they decide to discontinue it. That is sensible, and that seems to be always how the story ends for CHIPS products. I mean, look at EQ Secure, MD, SSM, OSSS. None of them still stands today due to lack of financial support. I do admit that Emsisoft has done a good job in making the CHIPS to be friendlier, but what is shown to the public, is OA looks to be abandoned and exclusive to limited market only.

 

The key words being

Its been a good firewall/HIPS program over the years of development and I even used Online Armor ++
back in the days. One thing I noticed when testing latest version of Online Armor free (7.0.0.1866) is the
' scan online ' doesn't seem to work.
Uploading window pops up and just freezes at 100% or a error window shows.
Contact Anti-Malware network in realtime is checked. (default)

 

It doesn't matter if it still gets updates for the whitelist database or any other minor updates, the program version number is not moving since the last year. People wouldn't care about the small details, they always judge anything by the first impression and the impression OA has made is an abandonware only for exclusive market. They could do some things to attract new market though, like not publicly showing the current stable program version or at least not publicly showing the release date. And of course, the "for geeks only" wording must be removed. The word "geek", either being taken positively or negatively, won't bring any good impact to boost the sales of OA. Remember that OA has a strong rival: Comodo. A lot of people tend to recommend the later when comparing both and one of the two most used argumentations is about CIS being more actively developed than OA.

Then again, for the sake of appropriateness they still need to release a new version once in a while, even just for small bugfixes. No need to add fancy new features in a rush, just bugfixes and of course, OS compatibility. Windows 10 is going to be released and people will always wonder if the product would be compatible and usable in the newest platform.

Personal past experience: it did not work as good as in Windows 7 in my Windows 8.1 system, don't blame me if doubts raised questioning if it will get any better in next OSes if it is still stuck in this particular version that has been around for over 365 days. It is rather hard to stay on the same OS for the eternity just for the sake of one software.

 

Hello @Fabian Wosar
as quoted by @GrafZeppelin, that is exactly the point,
How can you expect to attract new customers for OA and as a result continue developing OA when the last version has been released a year ago and there is zero to none presence of OA online in terms of reviews, tests, benches, comparisons etc?
How would a new user looking for a free/paid firewall even come to know about it?
and even if he comes to know about it, why would he pay and install for it without knowing nothing about it?
isn't it time to make OA a well known product?
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=f...l2.4032j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8
the Google search for free firewalls don't even show Online Armor.
I get the feeling that you are not even trying?!

Your response basically means that the onus of development of OA indirectly fall on the customers,
isn't that a flawed approach in the first place?

It is basically saying that since you have a small team of developers you'd rather concentrate on your more profitable products,
while Online Armor will be supported "once in a while", if the number of "subscriptions pay for its development",
shouldn't continued and unhindered development come before attracting subscriptions?

I respect your stand in saying you have to have funds to develop,
but it is very baffling to me,
its like asking a sapling to bear fruits before watering it.

 

I would see it this way:

Consider that the free version of OA is a free trial, when the user is satisfied with the free version, they might think about buying a license for OA Premium which offers more features. The search engine and home-style review in blog articles can be used as publication/advertising, the free version is a bait to attract users to upgrade to OA Premium. But of course they need to arrange strategies so they won't end up giving too much to the free users. As I always say, first impression does matter.

 

Which is deliberate given the more than 40% refund rate we had before when trying to push it towards casual users. Face it. Trying to fool yourself into believing that Online Armor is home user friendly is pointless. It isn't. It's a niche market tool. Every stand alone firewall product out there is.

We will look into it, thanks.

It works on all our test machines. Some people reported some issues with installing certain updates where Online Armor blocks the registration of some updated components during boot. That can be avoided by installing updates with learning mode enabled though, which is recommended anyways. The only other incompatibility we found was with parsing of digital signatures that has been fixed a few months ago with a component update. That didn't bump the version info though. It is pointless to force people to download a new version just for the sake of pushing out a new version number. If you have any other problems, please let me know and we will look into them.

There never has been big publicity. Standalone firewalls have been a niche market for a very long time now. The few firewall tests you find nowadays are usually as part of suite comparisons.

Shows up for me on first page. Must be a regional difference.

The onus of development of any product always indirectly falls on the customers using it.

Except that Online Armor isn't a sapling. It's a full grown tree.

That is a big issue with Online Armor actually. The free version has always been way too powerful.

 

Had the free version of Online Armor installed (less than 30 days IIRC) and wanted to trial the Premium
version. (3o day trial) When clicking on the radio button in Online Armor it gave me an error popup window
indicating trial period expired. Uninstalled Online Armor. (v.7.0.0.1866) Proceeded to Emsisoft website to
download Online Armor app and tried to install program & selected 30 day trial, but again error popup window
indicating again trial has expired.

NOTE: Free version will install, but Premium version trial will not.
NOTE: I also rebooted several times before trying to re-install Online Armor.

 

Trials are bound to your hardware and software licenses. Meaning: If you used the trial before, even if it was a long time ago, you will not be eligible to a trial any longer. I have sent you 1 month key via PM. Feel free to use that one to try OA Premium again .

 

Exactly, "it was"...........

AV-C: Firewall Test March 2014
http://www.av-comparatives.org/firewall-reviews/

 

Except that nobody has been able to replicate the results. Even their logs indicate that all connection attempts have been blocked. The only result that can be explained is why RDP isn't blocked. Because it is disabled by default and needs to be enabled manually which is why its port is not on the list of protected ports by default.

 

It also occured for me, and I can say I never installed OA on the machine.
Maybe I had to contact you, but in that time I didn't have much time so I just purchased OA.
Well, no need to worry because I was willing to purchase if it worked, and in fact it worked!
I currently uninstalled OA, but I keep it in my setting option, and probably use it on new machine if I don't use it for this machine again.
Contrary to some people, I actually want more granular control as I suggested in Emsisoft forum.

 

The same applies for Emsisoft Anti-Malware & Emsisoft Internet Security or not?
I'm asking because I see no excuses for EAM & EIS... Because these results are good?

I had the OA since the Tall Emu era.

 

I don't think EIS has ever been tested by AV-C. That being said, the non-commissioned tests performed by AV-C are different. For starters, AV-C actually expects that there are errors in their results. So every participant gets the results a few weeks in advance to verify that misses are actually misses and false positives are actually false positives. There is also an official dispute process, that most vendors make regular use of if the results reported by AV-C can't be replicated.

Bottom line is: We disagree with the first results we get from AV-C quite often. But since those tests account for disagreements ahead of time, they are usually already solved at the time the test is made public.

 

@ Fabian Wosar,
Thanks for clarifying that.

 

Should be fixed now.