User guide

Product Review: Mac Security ‐ July/August 2014 www.av-comparatives.org
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Again, this persists until the user clicks on it.
When a flash drive is scanned, malware found
is displayed in a list, with options to
quarantine (“Chest”) or delete the items:
We found Avast’s phishing and malware alerts
to be very good. The pop-up messages make
clear that the threat has been blocked, and
provide useful information for advanced users,
such as the URL or file path. Not everyone will
like the fact that the pop-up alerts persist
until clicked, but they can be set to a shorter
time or disabled altogether in the program’s
preferences. We feel that it is better to have a
persistent message than one which comes and
goes too quickly to read.
Malware protection test
Mac malware detected: 100%
False positives: 0
Windows malware detected: 100%
Help
The only help function available directly from
the program itself is the search box in the
Help menu. This uses the OS X menu search
feature, which shows the user where to find
the search item in the menus:
The support section of the avast! website
(which has to be accessed manually) has a
support section for avast! Free Antivirus for
Mac. However, at the time of writing (July
2014), all the instructions here related to the
previous version of the program, 8.x. The
interface of this version is clearly significantly
different to the current one, meaning that
most of the help topics are irrelevant.
We can only describe Avast’s current help
features as being non-existent. Although
there is a forum, we do not regard this as an
acceptable help service on its own, as it is
very much the luck of the draw as to whether
there is a contributor who is willing and able
to answer a user’s question. Although the
program is essentially simple and easy to
navigate, we suggest that a manual or support
pages applicable to the current version would
be very valuable for non-expert users.
Verdict
avast! Free Antivirus for Mac identified 100%
of samples in both Mac malware and Windows
malware tests, and has a largely very
straightforward program interface, albeit with
the odd quirk.
The program interface is very clean, although
we would suggest that some improvements
such as a Fix-All button. We could not find
any help features relevant to the current
version, and hope that the manufacturers will
release updated instructions soon.