Avast Free Antivirus For Mac 2016: The Ultimate Solution for Your Mac's Safety

Each month, we stop over 1.5 billion cyberattacks all around the globe thanks to an unrivaled threat detection network, which is why professionals and amateurs alike love our free and paid antivirus protection.

Avast Free Antivirus For Mac 2016

Download File

Panda Internet Security 2016 is two-folded: it has great antivirus features but lags behind most of its competitors on many other fronts. Although it can adequately protect your Mac from a wide variety of virus, its firewall options are very limited and not so powerful.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free is a free antivirus software especially designed to protect your Windows PC. Quick to install and light on computer resources, it is good for gaming, image and video editing, and resource-intensive applications.

Avast Free Antivirus 2016 offers an antivirus and anti-malware protection, along with features you're most likely to need, but would rather not think about - like one-click system checks, and unwanted toolbar removal. The free home network scanner now detects 12 more types of router vulnerabilities, and a new password manager feature means your antivirus can now save, and encrypt, all your passwords. This edition is FREE OF CHARGE for non-commercial & home use.

You might expect that a free antivirus would come with only the most basic protection, with advanced bonus features reserved for paying customers. In truth, many of the most popular free antivirus tools offer full-scale protection along with a ton of extra features. Avast Free Antivirus gives you more than many competing commercial products. On top of excellent antivirus protection, it adds a network security scanner, a password manager, browser protection, and more. It's an amazing collection of security features, considering that this product is free.

Avast acquired rival free antivirus company AVG in 2016. Fans of both companies can rest easy; three years later, there's still no plan to merge them into a single product. Both have many thousands of users worldwide, but each is strong in geographical areas where the other is weak. And the underlying antivirus engine is exactly the same in Avast and AVG AntiVirus Free, as demonstrated in my tests and independent lab tests.

Editors' Note (1/27/2020): We recently reported on a problem with sharing of user data between Avast and its subsidiary Jumpshot. As of this writing, Avast has eliminated sending detailed information from its browser extensions to Jumpshot, but the online security component still necessarily sends each URL you visit to Avast for analysis. If you don't opt out of sharing, that URL history still goes to Jumpshot, and can still be used to match your supposedly anonymous data with your real personal profile. That being the case, we can no longer recommend Avast Free Antivirus as an Editors' Choice in the category of free antivirus protection. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free remains an Editors' Choice in that category.

This product is only free for personal use. If you want to use Avast in a business setting, you must upgrade to Avast Premium Security, which replaces both Avast Internet Security and the all-inclusive Avast Premier. It's a simpler product line than most, just a free antivirus and a for-pay suite.

Of the many antivirus products I track, 10 don't appear in results from any of the labs. Avast is one of the magnificent seven featured in all four lab reports. I use an algorithm that normalizes all the results to a 10-point scale and produces an aggregate score from 0 to 10. The aggregate score of 9.2 points for this free antivirus product is good; only a few have done better. Looking just at those tested by all four labs, Avira Antivirus is at the top, with 9.9 points. Norton comes next, with 9.8, and then Kaspersky, with 9.7. Bitdefender and Sophos each managed a perfect 10, based on three and two labs respectively.

Password management is an unexpected feature for a free antivirus, though Avira offers Avira Password Manager as a companion to its free product. Avast Password Manager handles all the basic functions, and does them well, but that's as far as it goes.

Avast Free Antivirus offers antivirus protection that earns good scores in my hands-on tests and very good scores from the independent testing labs. As for bonus features, it offers much more than many competing commercial products, including a network security scanner, a password manager, and more. However, the ongoing problems with Avast's handling of personal data from its many users means we can no longer justify name it an Editors' Choice product for free antivirus.

Kaspersky Free is our Editor's Choice free antivirus. Where Avast gets very good ratings from the four independent labs that I follow, Kaspersky gets even higher marks. It comes with a bandwidth-limited VPN, but not many other frills. The key with Kaspersky is getting antivirus protection loved by the labs without any cost.

Avast was founded by Pavel Baudiš and Eduard Kučera in 1988 as a cooperative. It had been a private company since 2010 and had its IPO in May 2018. In July 2016, Avast acquired competitor AVG Technologies for $1.3 billion. At the time, AVG was the third-ranked antivirus product.[6] It was dual-listed on the Prague Stock Exchange and on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until it was acquired by NortonLifeLock in September 2022.[7]

In 2014, CVC Capital bought an interest in Avast for an undisclosed sum. The purchase valued Avast at $1 billion.[18][19] Later that year, Avast acquired mobile app developer Inmite in order to build Avast's mobile apps.[20] Additionally, in 2014 Avast's online support forum was compromised, exposing 400,000 names, passwords and email addresses.[21][22] By 2015, Avast had the largest share of the market for antivirus software.[15] In July 2016, Avast reached an agreement to buy AVG for $1.3 billion.[23] AVG was a large IT security company that sold software for desktops and mobile devices.[24] In July 2017, Avast acquired UK-based Piriform for an undisclosed sum. Piriform was the developer of CCleaner.[25] Shortly afterwards it was disclosed that someone may have created a malicious version of CCleaner with a backdoor for hackers.[26] Avast had its IPO on the London Stock Exchange in May 2018, which valued it at 2.4bn and was one of the UK's biggest technology listings.[27] 2ff7e9595c