Scot Finnie Concludes Firewall Testing - And The Winner Is?
After a year and a half of testing, Scot Finnie has finally concluded which is the best of the best when it comes to firewall protection. Needless to say it wasn’t the built in firewall supplied by Microsoft. 
But before we discover who Scot has given the honor to, I want to commend Scott for his tenacity is staying in for the long haul. A long haul that has included email battles between himself and executives at Comodo when Scot criticized their product.
Scot’s winner for firewall of 2008 is given to Online Armour. Scot states:
There are many reasons why I’ve selected Online Armor
(OA) as the best software firewall for Windows users; the rest of this
story delivers the details. But boiled down to a single thought, the
most important reason is this: Online Armor offers the best blend of a
high degree of protection with a high level of usability.That may sound simplistic, but in this software category such a balance
is the toughest thing for a software development company to achieve.
It’s very easy to throw up a blizzard of pop-up user-prompts. You can
make your system so secure that you’ll never want to use it again. It’s
also easy to dumb down the security so much that you’ll rarely, if
ever, see a pop up — and in the process, render the firewall
ineffective. The trick is to offer solid protection with minimal user
interruptions. OA 2.1 is the only firewall software I’ve tested that
delivers a near-perfect balance.
That pretty much states Scot’s feeling about which is the best of the best. He than goes on to say that Comodo is a very fine product as well.
I have been using Comodo 3 the free edition for well over a month. Though it does have some overly protective pop ups, it is not so offensive as to cause me to stop using it. I haven’t full explored OA but will be taking a look at it.
You can read Scot’s newsletter from here.
See what you think and share your opinion. What software do you think is the best firewall?
Comments welcome.
Tags: firewall, best, 2008, online armour, comodo, test, pop ups, protection
Hi Scott,
I thank you for your blog/newsletter as I’ve found them to be most informative and beneficial. I must however take issue with your selection of Online Armor (OA) as the “best”. I write this because I went directly to their site and downloaded their trial version and from two days of use I decided to purchase OA.
My past firewall experience was with Sygate’s Personal Pro, which I liked and was able to master my settings to obtain maximum protection. On the other hand OA has troubles with their ‘Registry’ button working thereby prohibiting this user from upgrading properly to the paid version.
I’m informed now that a new build has corrected that problem but as of this writing I’ve not downloaded/installed it.
While I’m using the ‘free’ version (yes, I’ve the PayPal receipt for the paid version) it has on one ocassion deleted icons on the system tray and their respective programs. I’m unable to play solitaire with PySol (albeit an old program that BTW runs on both W2K & XP Pro (both w/SP UTD) but not now on W2K. My Creative Audigy 2ZS sound disappeared causing me to reinstall it to obtain functionality. FireFox 2.0.13 had slowed to a walk, even after my appying PitStop’s speed up tips. I’m writing this while working within my W2K SP-4 system (have dual boot w/XP Pro) which has slowed but I’m unable to quantify the speed loss. I am experiencing other minor pains as well and these are ONLY with the ‘free’ version.
Perhaps TallEmu has been inundated with requests due to your most favorable write-up but this time Scott, OA leaves me frustrated. And yes,
I did email with these and more issues…so shame on me for just jumping
on a product lauded within this blog; I can assure you it will NEVER happen again.
I appreciate your great blog and its’ content but thus far OA hasn’t even gotten to first base. BTW, I found nothing to deal with ICMP???
Continued success,
Jay S. Zeltzer