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Norton AntiVirus (NAV) is the flagship product of Symantec Corporation and is one of the most widely installed anti-virus programs. The current version is Norton AntiVirus 2006.
Since its birth in 1990, over 100 million people around the world have used it. Early versions of Norton AntiVirus were integrated and took much from Central Point Anti-Virus (CPAV), which was acquired by Symantec in 1994. CPAV was also integrated into the Microsoft Anti-Virus utility.
Despite its widespread adoption, it carries a reputation within parts of the computer enthusiast community as being slow and inefficient, difficult to uninstall, and ineffective. Some computer professionals have reported encountering machines infected with a virus despite having NAV installed and (in most cases) being fully up-to-date.
In addition, its GUI is considerably bogged down, especially on slower computers, because it is rendered using Internet Explorer's HTML engine instead of standard Windows graphic interface libraries.
According to an article by the Washington Post, Norton Antivirus has one of the worst average response times for providing virus definition updates based on the worst virus outbreaks of 2005, lagging behind every major competitor, including Kaspersky, F-Secure, Sophos, AntiVir, Trend Micro, F-Prot, Panda, AVG, Avast, and McAfee.
For everyday viruses, according to an article by Eweek titled Why Is Symantec So Slow with Updates?, Symantec is the only vendor that provides virus definition updates on a weekly basis, as opposed to competitors such as McAfee that provides them on a daily basis or Sophos, Kaspersky or Panda that provide them several times a day.
However, Symantec does provide frequent beta and "Intelligent Updater" definitions in the form of manually downloadable 8-10MB packages (although impractical for daily use for even highly technical users) as well as daily updates for LiveUpdate Platinum customers such as large corporations and businesses.
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Professional reviewers v. actual opinions
There are certainly a wide variety of opinions on the product, with professional reviewers tending to give it good rankings (often describing it as the best in its category), but actual user reviews tend to describe it as poor.
For instance, ZDNet's review of Norton AntiVirus 2004 rated the software "7.8 Very good", but the contributed user rating average was just "4.5 Mediocre" as of July 2005. Other reviewers have described the software as "memory hungry" or "system resource hogger", including the UK's PC Plus magazine review of the 2004 edition.
However, on November 9th, 2005, CNet.com, a professional reviewer, gave Norton AntiVirus 2006 a score of 5.5 out 10 with an even worse average user rating of 3.2 out of 10.
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