2. Interface

If first impressions are everything, Norton Internet Security 2008 loses us at "Hello." The new interface, shared among all 2008 Norton security products except Norton 360, is dark and garish, almost a perverse joke on those seeking reassuring security for their desktop. The use of ominous thick black borders and bright yellow/orange graphics suggests Halloween, a look that could get old by March. Unlike with Kaspersky, you can't change the look and feel of Norton Internet Security 2008. Unlike McAfee Internet Security 2008, Norton's interface isn't very intuitive or pleasing to the eye

3. The main characteristics of a product

Our central problem is that while Norton Internet Security 2008 offers some useful features, we had no way of tweaking or learning more about any of the features. Drilling down into the configuration settings, we see "Turn on Suspicious Activity Monitoring" or "Turn on Bloodhound heuristics"--but do we really need these features? Symantec provides us with very little additional information (for example, the built-in Help file says only "Turn on Bloodhound heuristics," not what it does), continuing with a practice adopted long ago by Symantec of making decisions for the user rather than presenting the user with options. Then there's my favorite "Turn on Advanced Mode" under the Suspicious Activity Monitor--it's not on by default, so should we turn it on? (Apparently the only difference between regular and Advance Mode is that the Suspicious Activity Monitor will log it in regular and alert you in Advanced mode.) Again, you have to accept that Norton has your best interests in mind

Kaspersky Internet Security also uses similar enable/disable options--that's really not at issue here. The difference between these products is that Kaspersky offers a thorough PDF user's manual explaining your choices. Norton does not. Unless you are fluent in Symantec speak, configuration options such as Bloodhound, Browser Defender, and SONAR are meaningless. Nor can you truly customize these in any meaningful way, with few options to provide unique rules. Symantec limits (if not removes) a user's ability to customize and tweak individual settings throughout Norton Internet Security 2008; for example, there's no quick way to set Norton to only scan new or recently modified files. Head-to-head, Kaspersky and McAfee both give users more enable/disable options.

We're also not keen on Symantec's use of a large yellow block in the task tray that says Norton all the time. While other vendors have discrete icons, even icons that rotate or blink, we found the constant advertisement in the lower-right-hand corner visually distracting and unnecessary. Norton Internet Security 2008's pop-up alerts were no bigger or smaller than its competitors.

Norton Internet Security 2008 includes all the basic features within Norton Antivirus 2008. Additional features include wireless protection and transaction security. What Norton Internet Security doesn't include is backup and restore protection or PC maintenance--both of which are provided in McAfee Internet Security 2008. For the Norton version of these, you'll have to purchase additional Symantec products.

Within Norton Internet Security, we really didn't like the antiphishing feature. It's not that it doesn't work--the antiphishing feature within Norton Internet Security 2008 works very well. It's when you turn it off (as we did from time to time during our testing), that we found it's harder to turn back on than other antiphishing tools on the market today. And, more ominously, without Norton antiphishing turned on, Norton Transaction Security features remain active, allowing us to provide personal information to various phishing sites.

When we turned off antiphishing protection within the Norton Internet Security 2008, a dialog box stated that the feature will be enabled again after 15 minutes. Fine. However, the fine print is that while Norton Internet Security re-enables the antiphishing feature 15 minutes later, your browser does not. You have to restart the browser. Had we forgotten that 15 minutes was up, we might have merrily continued to surf the Web without any antiphishing protection. McAfee's SiteAdvisor allows you to enable and disable the feature within the browser, avoiding this problem entirely.

While Norton Phishing Protection was turned off, we further discovered another, more serious scenario. When Norton Phishing Protection is turned off, the Identity Safe feature remains enabled--in fact, we couldn't figure out how to disable Identity Safe (apparently there's no configuration option for it). Shortly after disabling Norton Phishing Protection, we accessed a fraudulent banking site. Norton, perhaps seeing that it was a banking site, asked if we wanted to use the ID card's personal information to populate the Web form on the page. Suppose we were sleepy; supplying the password would be a mindless click. Suddenly our phishing site is filled in with our personal information.