F-Secure please stop using Windows Firewall as a main source for your Products!
Comments
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The basic Windows Firewall has improved over the years.
For example, although the one in Windows 7 is a "basic" firewall, it does offer "statefull inspection" and windows service hardening(WSH) that many third party firewalls do not have. Further, in its default setting it passes all stealth ports tests and also offers excellent IPv6 protection.
However, its weaknesses include many of the advanced features found in third party firewalls such as denial of service(Dos), packet protection, ARP protection, etc. BUT if you are behind a router with a good built-in firewall, some of these additional protections can be provided by the router such as DoS, handling of fragmented packets. etc.
Another weakness of the Windows Firewall is outbound protection. By default it allows all outbound traffic which is fine as long as your machine is malware free. So in F-Secure, outbound and application filtering is managed by DeepGuard.
Further, you could always have more outbound control by running one of the many Windows Firewall Controllers; see for example TinyWall.
IMHO, for Home users if you are behind a router then F-Secure 2013/2014 using the Windows 7/8 Firewall for port filtering will be fine.
For the average user, the lack of confusing popups, network activity charts and lists of open ports will be welcome.
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As a luddite XP user, I'd certainly like to see a more capable Firewall within F-Secure products. The Windows Firewall may well have improved on later versions of Windows, but there are still a heck of a lot of XP users, who aren't getting the full firewall protection that other security suites still offer. This is a bad selling point for F-Secure, who cannot expect all of it's users to have upgraded to Windows 7 or 8, and I see no real reason not to reincorporate the Firewall component back into the suite (giving users the option to receive popups or not), providing that it doesn't cause issues with iTunes again.
