What's more, as third party antivirus software becomes increasingly irrelevant, many of these companies resort to harmful and even actively malicious tactics to stay in business. On the more benign end, you see an increase in 'safe web browsing' and such tools that parse javascript while browsing and somehow attempt to make it.. safer, I guess. My main experience with these things is when they randomly decide to block bits of code on our sites, breaking functionality for no discernible purpose.

Far worse are the lengths that a company like AVG will go to to get and keep their software installed on your computer. Their browser toolbars essentially take all the dirty tricks they've apparently learned dealing with malware to.. build a piece of malware. Honestly whether it's active malice, incompetence, or lack of motivation I don't know, but I do know I've spent hours trying to extract their stuff from people's browsers. (I should say here that I fully expect someone reading this has managed to uninstall an AVG toolbar with no issues. They have multiple different auxiliary tools to their antivirus, and I'm not sure specifically which one(s) caused me trouble personally. It's also likely that they're only a _real_ pain in certain circumstances. But regardless, if you google something like 'how uninstall avg' or 'avg malware' I'm sure you'll find many more examples.)