Avast Online Security
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Vivaldi noob here. I just switched from Firefox today. So with Vivaldi's built-in tracker and ad blocking, does it still need the Avast Online Security extension? Or is Avast superfluous?
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@D35J Yes. Avast is superfluous, and may do more harm than good. I have not used any third-party Antivirus or Firewall since upgrading to Windows 10.
In my experience, many problems are caused by antivirus products that trigger false positives. I have had all of my Serif programs suddenly stop working one day because an antivirus had quarantined a vital DLL.
Windows Defender and Microsoft's firewall are enough for daily use. Occasionally, I will run the free Malwarebytes, but it rarely finds any threats.
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Avast has evolved into nothing more than a spyware under the guise of a security suite...Avoid,
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@D35J Hi, to actually answer your question instead of just giving an opinion on Avast itself:
It's really up to you. If you feel you need the extra features of the extension, like the site reputation rankings, then by all means use it. Just be aware that extensions sometimes cause issues with web-sites that are not always easy to figure out for the user.
Note that Vivaldi's tracker blocker is for privacy, not security, even if the ad-blocker lists will block requests to some known malicious sites.
If running Avast locally it should also block access and warn when attempting to access a malicious site. And I assume the lists it uses are updated more regularly than the public lists used by Vivaldi.
So my opinion is you don't need the extension itself, unless you need the site reputation ranking feature. But keep Avast running locally for overall system security.
