When I was younger, the standard windows firewall was seen as weak and worth replacing asap with premium or strong free anti viruses, like Avast. What changed to make Windows Defender competitive? It looks like a few years ago something suddenly happened and now everybody on the market has great protection.
In: Technology
One thing that people missed: 3rd party AV software got worse over the years. Big players like Norton, McAfee, AVG, and others always had an issue of being overly bloated and intrusive. Between being a massive resource hog, and being preinstalled in most computers, people eventually grew a distaste for them.
Early on, one of the major push to use OSX (now MacOS) or Chromebooks was the relatively weak security Windows used to have. Microsoft has a very strong incentive to fix those security issues, as people used to think that Windows is very insecure, especially without an antivirus.
It was a gradual change, with Windows firewall and Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool in XP, Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7, Windows Defender in 8.0, etc. Between making Windows itself more secure, and the slow improvements with Windows Defender, it became the de facto standard in Windows security.
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