AV-Comparatives summary report 2013
NikK
Posts: 935 Rock Star
Product of the year goes to Kaspersky Internet Security.
Top Rated products for 2013 are Bitdefender, ESET, F-Secure, Avast, BullGuard, Fortinet and AVIRA.
File Detection Winner(high detection rate of malware without causing too many false alarms): F-Secure (99.6%)
Additional F-Secure notes
Sophos, Avast, F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab and Bitdefender demonstrated a lower impact on system performance than other products.
When the real-time protection of F-Secure discovers malware on a flash drive, the alert shown is clear, reassuring, and does not require any user interaction; experts users can however see further details.
If protection components are disabled, F-Secure and Trend Micro supplement the rather fleeting warning from Windows Action Center with their own, much more obvious and persistent warnings.
Comments
Good news! Well done, F-Secure!
Some observations;
1. Although F-Secure did very well in the File-Detection category, this is not the best way to judge how well F-Secure protects users. The file-detection results are only relevant for mail and file servers. File-detection by itself is irrelevant for most consumers. Home users get infected through a browser, email attachments, USB sticks, network worms, P2P clients etc. They DON'T get infected by disabling their AV, copying millions of samples into some random folder and then scanning on-demand; the method used in av-comparatives file-detection tests.
The results which are the most relevant to your average user are those seen in the real-world tests, because they are judging protection when files are executed.
Overall, F-Secure is not top of the vendors but 99.2% blocked in the real-world protection tests for August-November suggests that Home users are well protected by F-Secure.
2. In the User-Interface Review Section of the report;
They did not like the User Interface but overall, F-Secure did very well in the 2013 tests. IMO, improvements can still be made in performance, banking protection and detection of PUPS/adware/spyware/riskware.
In my opinion, Kaspersky is too complex and has too many options for the average user, and Bitdrfender is too far the other way, with too little in the way of configuration, and a poor alerts system. KIS also impacts significantly on the performance of each system I've seen it on, as does BD, to a lesser degree. Of the three, I think F-Secure offers the best balance of features and options, and has the least impact on system resources. There are some things I would change, such as bringing back fully independant parental controls, and I would certainly make DeepGuard more user configurable, but other than that, I think it's pretty good.