Mark’s recommended list of programs that everyone should have. Great Stuff. If you are stuck in the land of windows.
Let’s take a look at each of these.
1. Firefox. It’s a better browser. It’s not perfect. If you prefer Opera, that’s wonderful. Use Opera to your heart’s content, I like it too.
Firefox works fine on the Mac also, including all those plugins and extensions. If you don’t need all those plugins and extensions though, the Safari browser that comes with Mac’s works just fine for 99 3/4 % of the sites out there. Including online banking etc .
2. Thunderbird. Companion to Firefox, everyone should dump Outlook immediately. I rarely get to make this recommendation. If you CAN make the jump, I recommend it. (The reason I mostly don’t - I don’t feel Sunbird is up to the job for integrating calendars as Outlook has. Sunbird is MY choice for calendaring, but it shouldn’t be everyone’s yet. Thunderbird is superior for just reading email.)
Both Thunderbird and Sunbird (I think) work on the Mac. A better choice for Mac users is the built in Apple Mail with it’s superior-to-baysian-filtering and ease of use. iCal is the better calendaring app just for the ease of integration with other Apple applications and interoperability with the ical standard which Google Calendar among many others uses.
3. An anti-virus program. I’ll make two recommendations here:
AVG - Free, stupidly easy to use, it’s the first choice I recommend to clients.
AntiVir - This is a free one that’s really nice too. I’m less familiar with it, but when I’ve used it, it’s held up very well.
Clamwin - The AV I use. Good for me, not for everyone. Seems a little slow on my laptop.
No anti-virus is really needed on the Mac. Not at this time anyways. There’s always a chance of a zero-day exploit but . . . unless you are the kind of user that has spastic mouse clicking affliction and habitually downloads and installs (providing your administrator password when asked) random crap from the internet on a hourly basis.
There’s no cure for stupidity, but I suppose some AV software could help mitigate that. If you can put up with the 50% performance hit from crappily written AV software (Symantec, I’m talking to you… Mcafee, you’re not any better)
I suppose you could use ClamXav, if you so desired. Even so, check out the note on that (free) product’s page where they say there are currently no self propagating OS X viruses in the wild. The reasons for that being 1) windows is swiss cheese, 2) unix underpinnings in OS X are generally less swiss cheese (but they do have their holes from time to time too), 3) some features of OS X mitigate the holes by requiring the admin password before installing software or changing system prefs etc, 4) market share of OS X ( approaching 6% ) is still not big enough to interest the script kiddies who mostly want to get control over millions of zombie windows machines to attack random websites with . . .
4. A software firewall. Here, I only recommend Zone Alarm. This one is better than any other software firewall I’ve used - and VASTLY superior than many I’ve seen paid for (Symantec, I’m looking at YOU!)
5. Anti-spyware. There’s a big problem in the “Spyware”-fighting business. Mostly - you don’t know who you can entirely trust, and partially because anti-spyware companies are fighting amongst themselves. (Symantec, I’m looking at YOU!)
I strongly recommend Spybot Search & Destroy as everyone’s option #1.
I also use Ad-Aware SE.
The reason I pick Spybot S&D first is the licence. Ever read through dozens of pages of gobbly-gook when you install a program? I have to. I like Spybot’s terms.
A software firewall comes built into the Mac, just go to system prefs and turn it on. I do wish this was the default on fresh installs and brand new machines.
Just moving to the Mac will increase your resistance to virus, spyware, and other malware greatly. It’s not hard to improve on that a bit more with very little effort. No Anti spyware is really needed. Check out this hardening the Macintosh document from the University of Tennessee.
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