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Hey Grisoft: I love AVG but I hate popups!

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app103:
AVG is a great product. And Grisoft has done a wonderful service by offering a free version for all these years.

But...

They have recently resorted to WinFixer-like marketing tactics. Evey other day, when AVG updates itself, my browser opens to an ad for AVG.

The first time it happened it scared the crap outta me because I didn't touch anything that should have opened my browser. I waited, holding my breath, to see what evil thing was going to load, to give me some clue as to what had infected my pc so I could remove it. I was quite surprised to see an ad for AVG.

It's not like AVG hasn't opened a window with an ad for their full product before, just this time they decided to use the browser to do it. They used to use their own application to popup the ads.

Now before you decide to flame me for bashing a great product from a company that has been kind enough to give away a free version, consider this:

On a newer, faster machine...this is just an annoyance. You can just close the window...no harm done.

That being said, there is another issue that isn't just a mere user annoyance...

I have always liked how light AVG was and how well it ran on older low end machines without causing stability problems...liked it enough to publicly endorse it.

I am going to have to revise my endorsement for AVG for older slower PC's, due to the fact that many of them can't handle having more than 1 or 2 browser windows open at a time.

If AVG is going to open browser windows this frequently, this will cause problems on those PC's when their owners already have browser windows open.

I can't endorse a product that has a known issue that has a high potential to make your machine unstable every other day when it's updating. I can't endorse a product that has a high chance of causing your machine to lock up in the middle of you doing something important, leading you to lose whatever you were working on.

Lashiec:
Funny, I opened AVG because I haven't updated it in ages (as you may know, I have it configured to work like an additional on-demand scanner), and I wanted to see this popup for myself. So the program starts to grab updates as I instruct it to do, and I come on up this one:

Priority update
This update contains the following components:
     AVG Free Banner (version 487)
Total size is 51771 bytes

--- End quote ---

LOL. That may be the component creating the popups, which, of course, wasn't included before with AVG. Oh, well, I was thinking in uninstalling AVG anyway, with AntiVir and avast! I think I'm covered on the virus side.

It seems to add another new "feature" in the dialogs, a link to the Professional Version site. Now I recall seeing that message on Tuesday in the computers at college.

Ralf Maximus:
The first time it happened it scared the crap outta me because I didn't touch anything that should have opened my browser.

--- End quote ---

You know, this is a really bad idea, and not just for the reasons you cite.

As soon as some clever trojan author duplicates the AVG browser page and pops it up from somewhere on the 'net, some poor AVG user is going to click on what they think is a legitimate link from AVG.  Instantly, they'll become infected with the disease-of-the-day.  All thanks to AVG desensitizing its users to seeing ads from them within a browser.

Shame on AVG for not thinking this through.

hamradio:
Glad I decided not to go with them now.

icekin:
I don't seem to have it and I just updated my database.

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