[besson3c]

Why does it exist for OS X? What was Symantec's incentive to develop/port this product for OS X?

[CaptainHaddock]

What was Symantec's incentive to develop/port this product for OS X?

To take advantage of all those Windows refugees who have been fooled by years of crappy operating systems into thinking that every computer needs separate firewall/antivirus software.

Didn't fool me, because I already knew about OS X being virus free! (That's mostly why I switched.)

[ghporter]

The OS X firewall is good, but it's more basic than the Norton/Symantec product. For example, if the OS X firewall tells you explicitly when something it trying to get out I haven't seen it yet. The Norton firewall does that-very noticably.

Don't be too smug about OS X being "virus free." It's just a matter of time before somebody sees the growing Apple market share as a "challenge." OS X is not "virus proof," there just aren't any out in the wild right now.

Why do so many Mac users have to bash Windows? Macs and the Mac OS are much cooler, so why put down people who use other types of computers? I just don't understand it.

[theolein]

The basic Mac firewall, found in System Prefs is only laid out for incoming ports, but the underlying technology, ipfw (look up "man ipfw" in the terminal) can do far more than that, blocking outgoing as well as incoming ports and ip's as well as being stateful. It's among the best firewalls out there, but you need to learn how to use it. There are OSX apps that use ipfw as a backend, and the Mac's inherent flexibility means that there are lots of opportunities for developers to make Dashboard firewall widgets, applescript firewall widgets, full blown cocoa widgets or plain and simple command line scripted firewall utilities. I have one of the latter that blocks certain outgoing ip's when some applications are launched.

I would NOT use Symantec's application, as they have a poor reputation on OSX.

As for viruses on OSX, there still needs to be a remote vector or some kind of vulnerability such as an autolaunch vector, to make a virus easy to spread. Until then, it most probably won't happen, at least on a large scale. Apple's new launchd startup daemon fixes a whole host of previous local vulnerablities.

I agree that bashing Windows is a bit pathetic. WinXP/2k are fairly good and robust OS's and millions of people manage to do their daily work on them just fine.

[Randman]

Does this have the same (bad) reputation as every other Norton product for OSX? Is it also DOA.

And Glenn, I think Capt Haddock was right on. Like it or not, there's lots of FUD in selling virus protection on the Windows side and people automatically think they need it on OSX.

And while it's good to have some protection, imo, it's wrong for companies to prey on the fears of people to push their products.