Mass Effect 2 is the latest in their series of big budget RPGs for PCs and consoles. It continues the story began in the original Mass Effect, from 2007. Mass Effect 2 is bigger and better in almost every way, with beautiful visuals, great audio, good game design with useful skills and talents, and plenty of atmosphere. Combat is great, almost FPS-like, with different weapons and ammo, a good targeting system with double damage points for head shots, etc. The weapons are well thought out and feel different, each with its advantages and disadvantages, each requiring adjustments to your strategy.

Mass Effect 2 is a space based RPG, which borrows elements from a lot of cinematic history. People will find parallels to Firefly (the chief villains are aliens called “Reapers” which sounds suspiciously like the “Reavers” in Firefly, not to mention a wild-west sort of frontier much like Firefly, and Star Wars before that). There are elements of Blade Runner in the cityscapes on different worlds. The “Collector” ship (“Collectors” are another group we’re fighting in this story) has distinct touches of the Alien movies, with organic looking architecture vaguely reminiscent of H.R. Giger, Alien-like sound effects, and even “pods” that reminded me of the eggs in Alien. There are even elements of previous computer games like Starcraft.

I don’t say any of this to detract from Mass Effect 2. While it borrows heavily from different sources, it’s not a clone of any of them, and all the elements are well integrated into the story. The game is very polished and feels that way.

However, there is one problem that annoys me tremendously. In fact, that was what provoked me to write this blog entry. And that problem is the inability to fast forward through the dialog.

First, let me say that I am only writing about the PC version. I understand that the XBox version is different, and does in fact have a way to fast forward through dialog. So please don’t worry about it if you’re only playing Mass Effect 2 on the XBox.

Mass Effect 2 is an RPG, which means it has a strong story line. This is good – in fact, it’s considered a mark of great RPGs to have a story which can interest the player and draw him into the game. The downside of it is that the story is told mainly through dialog and cut scenes. Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly long game, taking many hours (many days of many hours) to complete. Unfortunately, a large portion of this is dialog.

Now I understand that not everyone may have a problem with dialog. After all, there are people who love the old D&D games, which are almost purely dialog – reading stuff on the screen. Not to mention there are many RPG fans to whom story and dialog are an essential part of enjoying the RPG genre. If the game doesn’t provide a sufficient story element, these people make it up on their own.

I point to World of Warcraft as proof – not only does it have an incredibly detailed background spanning multiple games from Blizzard, it also has tons of in-game information about the story, factions, events, and characters available for anyone interested. But since it’s primarily an action RPG, you don’t really need to know any of that in order to play the game. You pick your faction, you roll a character, you start playing. The guys with the red name tags are enemies, you kill them. Sure, there’s some dialog from quest givers. But it’s short and sweet. There is no waiting – the text appears along with the dialog, if you read faster than the dialog is spoken, you can click right in the middle of the dialog and move on. If you’re playing your second or third character and know what choice you’ll make, you can skip the reading too, you already know where to click. This keeps the action moving for those of us who like the “action” part of the action RPG genre.

Yet even in this very action oriented game, the story and background are there for those who care about such things. Blizzard simply leaves it up to the player to determine their own level of interest and tolerance for things such as story and background, which get in the way of gameplay.

To get back to my point – even when the game doesn’t force you to spend a lot of time listening to dialog and involving yourself in the story, some people create ways to do that for themselves. This is why Blizzard has role-playing servers, and there are multitudes of people who create guilds that deliberately build a mythos that relates to the story line. These are people who love fantasy, obviously, and to them a good part of the enjoyment of the game is fantasizing about their character, the story, the events. I’ve heard of people getting kicked out of their guild for “breaking character” – the offence of repeatedly talking as if they were Joe the Computer Gamer, rather than Aragorrrn the Magnificient on a quest to retake Alliance territory from the evil Horde.

Now while I don’t grudge these people their fantasy – their money is just as good as anyone else’s, and they have just as much right to enjoy themselves as anyone else – I have to say that I am not one of them. Very emphatically not. I like stories as much as anyone else, but the fact is that when I’m playing a computer game, I want to play a computer game, not listen to an audio book. If I’m in the mood for a story, I’ll read a novel. That’s not to say I think computer game writers are cheap hacks. Some of them might be good writers. But I am not playing a computer game to read pages of text on my screen, or to listen to hours of dialog. That’s what books and movies are for, in my opinion.

This is why I have such a problem with Mass Effect 2. This game has way too much dialog, too many cut scenes. In short, there is too much time when the game takes over my keyboard and mouse, and turns me into a passive reader/listener. This is not why I play games.

In case you are not a gamer and wondering why this is such a big deal, let me explain. Since the game is a well-designed RPG, events unfold very much based on the choices you make. Typically, RPGs tend to build upon the motivations of your character. In fact, they have a vocabulary assigning your character to a spectrum ranging from Lawful Good through Chaotic Neutral to Lawless Evil. It’s sort of a continuum, with characters being lawful, neutral or lawless, and good, neutral, evil. What kind of character you are depends upon the choices you make in the game, and this in turn affects how other people in the game respond to you. These differences can be quite dramatic, with whole parts of the story arc or side quests being closed to one kind of character but open to another.

This is also true for Mass Effect 2, which uses the words “paragon” to describe “good” and “renegade” to describe “evil”. It doesn’t matter what words a game uses, RPG gamers know that every time they talk to a character and try to reason with him instead of shooting him (and vice versa), they are making a choice to fulfill their role as “good” or “evil” and that this choice will have consequences for game play. In other words, they have to pay attention to such matters.

The problem happens when the game makes you sit through a screenful of text, 2 minutes of dialog, a lengthy cut scene, before you are allowed to click a button and make your choice. Now imagine this happening over and over and over throughout the game. You begin to realize you are spending a lot of your time just sitting back, listening to inane chatter and dramatic declamations, waiting for a button to appear on your screen. But we’re not done yet.

The consequences of a choice might not be apparent until the dialog is complete, and you see the message flash up “You just won 15 Paragon Points!” No matter how carefully you listen to the dialog, you’ll still make mistakes. Or maybe you just got bored the 36th time this happened, and your attention wandered. At the end, the message flashes “You just won 15 Renegade Points!” Damn. You just moved 15 points into the evil column instead of 15 points into the good. Or the other way around, if you were trying to be evil. What do you do? Well, the only thing you can do is to load from the last save you made, and play some portion of the game again, to come back to this dialog, so you can pay more attention and make the right choice.

It gets to the point where players get into the habit of automatically hitting the “save” button before any such dialog. Of course, you can’t always predict when the dialog will happen, so you’ll find yourself replaying significant portions of the game just because you clicked the wrong button on a dialog screen, because you were so damn tired of listening to the characters squawk that you had stuffed your ears with your fingers. No, I’m not kidding, I have actually done that with Mass Effect 2. Usually the second or third time I was forced to replay the same dialog to pick a better choice.

This turns the game from pure fun to alternating periods of pure fun and pure torture. Since we humans can’t instantly switch our emotions at will, even the periods of pure fun are marked by long slopes where the fun is admixed with irritation at the dialog you had to sit through a minute ago.

What does it take to avoid this, if BioWare had chosen to avoid it? Simple, it just takes two things:

1. Keep dialogs to a minimum. No matter how much you’re paying your writers, no matter how spiffy you think your dialog is, no matter whether you hired Hollywood talent to speak the voice parts for you. Remember, you’re selling a computer game. Not a book. Not a movie. Keep dialogs to a minimum. Mass Effect 2 has about 5 – 10 times as much dialog as is needed.

2. Always present the choices along with the dialog. Do not impose a delay, where the whole dialog has to be spoken before the choice buttons appear. After all, users have the choice to turn on subtitles to the dialog. They can read. If they can read faster than your voice talent speaks (which everyone does), they already have the information needed to make the choice long before the characters are done speaking. Let them make the choice when they are ready to make it. Don’t force them to wait for the whole tedious thing to be voiced out before you present them with choice buttons.

That’s all there is to it. But Mass Effect 2 breaks both these rules. Dialog is excessive. There no way to stop it. At least, not on the PC.

When I started this game, I picked “Soldier” as the class I wanted to play. Since the game is otherwise so excellent, very soon after I started I decided that I would play it again, as one of the other available classes. This is a great feature of RPGs, that you can replay them as another class for a whole new experience.

However, by the time I was about half way through it, all I wanted was for the game to end. There is no way on earth that I would sit through all that dialog again. It’s like getting a root canal. Two root canals. And then having the tooth pulled by a pair of rusty pliers just after you went through the trouble of getting the root canals.

It amazes me how game designers who spend millions of dollars on a game make such foolish choices. How willing they are to ruin the game experience for thousands of people (and I know I am not alone in this), for lack of a simple feature that would have been trivial to implement.

Again, please don’t take this as a rant against RPGs, or against people who love story lines, who love to listen to hours of dialog, who want cutscene after cutscene to the point where the game begins to look like a movie rather than a game. I have no problem with such people. It’s possible to give these people exactly what they want, but for the sake of those of us who want control back on our keyboards, just give us a fast forward button. You’re taking nothing away from anyone else if you do that.

Users have fought back with ad-blocking add-ons to their browsers. So far, the only browser that fully supports such add-ons is Firefox. Google Chrome will also introduce an extension scheme in version 4 of their browser (already in beta and available for download), and there are a couple of ad-blocking extensions already available for it (AdThwart, AdBlock) , though neither is as good as Ad Block on Firefox just yet. The market penetration of such extensions remains poor – it’s estimated that only 4% to 8% of Firefox users actually install and use Ad Block, though it’s been around for years. And Firefox (all versions combined) is installed on less than a third of all computers out there. So at this time, ad blocking extensions are not a major threat to ad revenue.

However, it seems likely that the popularity of such ad blocking extensions will continue through word-of-mouth advertising. Some of their success is linked to the success of the Firefox browser itself, which has continued to gain market share. Google Chrome is also a fast growing browser, and when it starts to offer extensions (in a non-beta version, which will be in a few months), it will likely also carry some ad blockers along with it. Anyone who has used an ad blocker knows for himself how immediately and profoundly it alters the web-surfing experience for the better, making surfing much more pleasant. So it’s not like ad blockers are a hard sell. I think that even if ad blocking isn’t a revenue threat to the ad industry now, it will become a threat in time.

This has hurt revenues in the web publishing industry. It’s not just extensions like AdBlock, which has a fairly negligible market presence – it’s more that users are simply ignoring ads. Coupled with the fact that non-ad revenue is also down, since fewer people buy newspapers or magazines; the result is that publishers are facing serious problems, shown in the number of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs in the industry.

Now I am not one of those who have a pathological hatred of  ads. I realize that much of the valuable content on the web is not produced by part-time hobbyist bloggers; it’s produced by people to whom publishing is a profession. These people don’t have other day jobs – they feed themselves and their families through the content they create for the web. They deserve to be paid for their work. And if they are not paid, they will be forced to turn to some other line of work to pay their bills, and the web will be poorer for it. For example, although news bloggers provide a lot of value added service, without the original news gathering efforts from paid journalists, there is only so much bloggers can do to recycle each other’s stories.

So far, very few people have figured out how to make money off a pay-to-view site. This may eventually change if Rupert Murdoch has his way. Any site that makes money off the internet would probably love to put their content behind a pay wall if they could, if they thought it would increase their revenue. But this has not worked for the large majority of people who have tried – it has only made viewers turn to alternative sources for similar content. Alternative sources are made viable by news aggregators like Google, who undermine pay wall protection by leading users to competitors who aren’t behind a pay wall. Clearly, things will not change until publishers band together in significant numbers and act together.

I don’t know when or if this will happen. However, I know that markets are driven by money, and eventually, a business model that produces poor revenues will be supplanted by one that produces better revenue. Whether that will be pay walls or court injunctions against the likes of Google or something else, I can’t say. But something will change.

For decades, ads supported a large fraction of the publishing industry. Over time, they became a proven way that worked for both publishers and readers. Publishers got their revenue; readers got cheap content, subsidized by ads. This worked well in the print medium, but somehow it has not translated well to the internet. I’d like to ask why, and suggest ways in which it could be made to work again.

I think the primary reasons why ad revenues have started to fail are:

1. Ads have become intrusive to the point that they are an annoyance even to those readers who might be inclined to buy, and people are starting to tune them out.
2. There is no good system for pricing internet ads, as there is for print and TV. Simple pay-per-click schemes don’t go far enough. They don’t sort out the public into marketer-friendly demographics where it’s possible to know well in advance how much an ad should cost, and what’s the most effective place to place it.

The first is relatively easy to deal with, but it requires some coordination and a great deal of work by someone with credibility enough to make it work. This is what I would propose. First, work out a standard that takes the annoyance factor out of ads. Second, create a certifying authority that vets ads and approves those that are non-annoying, and gives them a digital certificate of approval. Third, create a mechanism in ad-blocking products that permits certain ads to go through. Fourth, create a scheme that lets content providers serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to appear.

Each of these steps has major technical and organizational hurdles to cross, and even if they are crossed, it will never be 100% effective. However, it does not need to be 100% effective. It only needs to be reasonable enough to convince a majority of users, and non-threatening enough that people don’t care to expend a great deal of energy to circumvent it.

Let’s take each of these steps one at a time.

Taking the Annoyance out of Ads

Here are some rules for ads that would make them much less annoying for me. No doubt others could add items I have forgotten:

1. No pop overs or pop unders. Nothing that would open another window or tab in your browser unless you explicitly and deliberately click on the ads
2. Ads must not cover up or obscure content that the user visited the page to read. You must not require the user to acknowledge the ad by clicking a “close” or “go away” button before he is allowed to read the content. That only makes him hate you, and hate the ad provider.
3. No flashing, no animation, no movement of any kind. This is like asking a person to read a page in a book while ambulance lights flash and flicker in the background. They are distracting and make it harder to read the page.
4. No audio. Pages should never load with any audio playing. Audio should only be enabled after a deliberate and unmistakable click from the user, specifically requesting the audio.
5. Goes without saying, but I’ll add it anyway. Ads must be vetted for malware, browser hijacking, and similar exploits.
6. No mixing ads with copy. In other words, don’t use fake underlines and highlights on content, trying to fool the reader that such highlights or underlines are relevant to the content, when in fact they only point to ads.
7. Privacy concerns: although it’s useful for ad servers to keep track of users, and I would not suggest that they do away with this powerful mechanism that the internet provides for targeting ads, there should be some easy way for users to opt out of it. If you don’t provide it, users will build their own, and then you will be worse off than if you had just provided it in the first place.
8. 8. Ads should not unduly slow down page loads. More specifically, content should never have to wait for a slow ad server to be displayed.

I’d like to mention one more point, but separately from the list. That point is ad ratio. If your page is 75% ads and 25% content, your users will notice that. They are not stupid. This is not something that should be enforced by the ad certifying agency; it’s up to whoever owns the web pages in question. This is where that second agency I mentioned, the one that figures out ad prices, comes in. It may well be more profitable for some little company to create pages which are 4/5th ads and 1/5th content, in the hope that the greater number of ads will offset the decreased number of users. But this should reflect in the cost of those ads, which pay-per-click systems don’t always do. Print and TV have long-established means to price ads, with companies that survey and measure such things down to the last penny. The internet needs the same.

Certifying Agency

Not much to be said here. It could be a private corporation, or it could be a volunteer effort. There is really very little work to do, so long as the guidelines are very clear. Either an ad passes those guidelines and receives the certificate, or it doesn’t. Checksums and hashes can make sure that the certificate is paired with a specific ad, and that the ad producer can’t modify the ad after it’s been approved. Again, the point is that the guidelines should be clear enough that even a machine could figure out whether to approve or reject an ad.

Ad Blocking Software

This is the easiest part. Ad blocking browser extensions (and perhaps someday the browser itself) would have a built in mechanism that allows the user to select which ads will come through, simply by checking a box in the configuration. The browser or extension downloads the certificate from the authority, and vets each ad to make sure it’s been signed with the proper certificate.

Ad Serving

This is the hardest part to solve, technically. This is what the web server needs to implement at the content end. The goal is to serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to go through. To figure out how this might be done, consider how ad blockers work now.

There are several mechanisms, depending on the browser and extension. The best implemented is Ad Block on Firefox. This mechanism is based on a feature built into the Gecko engine, which is used by browsers like Firefox or Thunderbird. The feature is called “content policies”, and it’s simply an object that gets called whenever the browser is asked to load a page. It looks at the content (the address, plus some other stuff), and based on that, it decides whether to allow the content or not. Extensions like Ad Block simply define content policies. How they do so varies. One way is by maintaining a list of ad providers, and simply blocking their IPs. This is a really good way, because it prevents the browser from even downloading the ad, so you save bandwidth too, and the page loads faster. Another is by searching the text (through regexps) for stuff that is likely to be found in ads and not in content.

Chrome extensions at present don’t allow a mechanism for ad content not to be downloaded, since Chrome’s engine (Webkit) doesn’t have that feature from Gecko. So the ad content is downloaded, but after download the extension checks it against similar publicly available lists and also examines the text, and hides content that it thinks is an ad.

There are problems with both approaches, and also with the implementations. At present, it’s possible to create scripts on web pages that can detect the presence of Ad Block, and simply refuse to serve pages to browsers which have Ad Block installed. However, it’s still fairly uncommon to see a site that actively refuses to serve to Ad Block-enabled browsers. More often, it’ll just post a notice to the web page with something like “we know you’re using Ad Block, if you enjoy the content on this site, please consider turning off Ad Block or donating – here’s our PayPal button”.

It’s really not practical to expect users to turn Ad Block on and off individually for different sites, depending upon how much they like the content. Some will do it, but most will just keep Ad Block on, and ignore your message like they ignored the ads previously.

It’s also possible for users to circumvent the ad-block detection. But this also leads nowhere – it just produces a constant state of war, where content providers continue to develop ever smarter ways to detect Ad Block and users continue to invent new ways to circumvent it. This process never ends, as we’ve seen with various DRM schemes. No one really wins in the end.

Instead, we need to come to a consensus. This will only happen if content providers understand the very real problems faced by users, and take them seriously. And if users understand that content providers need to make money to continue working, and ads are a much better alternative than pay walls, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Because you’re using Windows. Because file fragmentation is a problem with every version of Windows, and it inexorably slows down your computer the longer you use it. Because browser caches are some of the highest file activity regions on your disk, which means they make the disk fragment very quickly. You don’t want your operating system or programs disks to be fragmented that fast, do you? So you make a separate scratch disk, just a tiny one, and place all browser caches and other fast changing files there.

Except that unlike Firefox or Internet Explorer, Chrome doesn’t let you choose the browser cache size or location. Instead, it dumps it right on your OS disk, which is about the worst place to have a browser cache.

Here’s how you can change the location of Chrome’s cache, despite the laziness of the programmers. What you do is manually create a directory for the cache on a disk of your choice. Then you set up a symbolic link from the default Chrome cache location to this new directory you’ve created. Chrome still thinks it’s dumping files in its default location, but the files are really going to a different disk.

Step by Step Instructions (Vista and Windows 7)

1. Shut down Chrome if it’s open. Now open Task Manager and look under the Processes tab to make sure there is no Chrome process running. This is necessary because even after shutting down the browser, the process often continues to run for a while to do housekeeping tasks. If it’s running, it will have locked the files you need to move, so the process won’t work. Make absolutely sure it’s not running.

2. Next, open Windows Explorer, navigate to where you want the cache to go, and make a directory there for the Chrome cache. In my case, I made a directory called “Chrome Cache and Profile” on drive S, as shown in the picture below.

3. Next, navigate to where Chrome stores its user profile. This will usually be:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

Move the entire “User Data” directory to the other drive, and make it a subdirectory of the new directory you just created in the previous step. So in my case, I moved it from the default location listed above to S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data.

4. Now open an elevated command prompt. This means that you right-click on the command prompt icon in the Start Menu, and choose “Run as Administrator”. In the command prompt window, enter the command:

mklink /J “C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data” “S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data”

Make sure you replace {username} with your own username, and change the directories as appropriate in your case. The quotes around the directory names are necessary, so leave them there.

That’s it. You’ve created a symbolic link from the default location to the new location of the User Data directory. Because you used the “/J” switch, Windows created what’s called a “junction”, which Chrome can’t see, so it continues to think that the directory hasn’t been moved, and proceeds as usual.

Note that if you did exactly like I described above, you’ve not only moved the Chrome cache, but the entire User Data directory, which also contains stuff like cookies, bookmarks, etc. If you don’t want to move the rest of this stuff over, dig deeper into the User Data subdirectory, and locate the cache subdirectory, which will be:

… User Data\Default\Cache

In that case, you could just make the symbolic link at that directory level, rather than at the User Data level. It’s up to you.

If you’re using Windows XP or Windows 2000

Windows XP and Windows 2K have the ability to make symbolic links but don’t come with a command line tool to make them. So if you’re using either of these two operating systems, you’ll need to download a tool to make them. Microsoft Technet offers Junction, which is a tiny utility that lets you add symbolic links in either XP or 2000.

The command would be:

junction C:\path-to-directory\User Data “S:\path-to-directory\User Data”

Make sure you fill in the proper paths to the source and linked directories, and also note that the second set of quotes is required.

Other Methods

Some people use a different method for changing the cache location, which is to start Chrome with an argument pointing to a separate directory. For example, if you wanted the cache to be located in S:\junk, you could make a shortcut to start Chrome with the command line:

C:\path-to-chrome-executable\chrome-exe –user-data-dir=s:\junk

This would work, but there are problems because a browser isn’t always started from a shortcut. Many other applications often invoke the default browser to display HTML stuff. So if Chrome is started by some other application, or in any way other than through your shortcut, it will still dump files in the default location and not in your junk directory. For this reason, I prefer the symbolic link method.

So I rearranged the programs in the All Programs list on the Start Menu to look more like XP. The image on the left shows the Start Menu, and the image on the right shows what happens when you click or hover over “All Programs”. As you can see, the programs have been arranged into directories, like “Communications”, “Utilities”, etc. This makes it much easier for me to find programs, and to keep track exactly what I have on this machine.

Here’s how to do it. Like Windows XP, Windows 7 also keeps program short cut locations in two places, depending on whether the program was installed just for the current user or for all users. However, the two locations are different in Windows 7.

Programs installed for All Users now go to:

 C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.

Programs installed for your user account only go to:

 C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.

Since most programs are installed by default for all users, the easier way is to go to the first location and make directories there. I typically make the directories “Office” (for MS Office, and related stuff such as font managers, scanning and OCR, etc.), “Viewers and Players” (for anything used purely for viewing a file, such as video and DVD players, audio and mp3 players, file viewers such as PDF, XPS, Lit viewers, etc.), “Communication” (for all web browsers, IRC, instant messengers, fax or terminal apps, etc.), and “Utilities” (for a bunch of miscellaneous stuff). Each directory can be nested, for example “Utilities” has nested subdirectories containing programs related to file/disk compression, disk operations (such as defrag, mounting virtual volumes, etc.), system (such as CPU-Z, Sisoft Sandra, Memtest and Prime95, etc.), hardware (such as mouse or keyboard settings, CoreTemp, Speedfan, etc.), and security (such as virus scanner and firewall, packet sniffer, Spybot, etc.).

Not only does it make easier to find programs, because you know exactly where to go instead of scanning a long list, it also makes it very easy to tell which programs you have installed. I know there are other ways of doing this, such as using the search feature, or checking Control Panel for installed programs. But I like stuff organized. And after a while, I tend to have so many programs installed that there’s no way I’d remember their names to search, nor at times even recognize their function if I happened to see the name in Control Panel. But if I have the Start Menu organized, then if I see a listing such as Start Menu > Programs > Video > VirtualDub, then I instantly recognize that VirtualDub was that program I downloaded off the web six months ago to edit videos.

My main reason for the switch was to get more memory. Some of my applications – Photoshop and 3ds Max in particular; use massive amounts of memory. I was living under the 32-bit OS limitation, which meant about 3.4GB of usable memory. This was not enough. Switching to 64 bit Win 7 has allowed me to expand the system RAM to 16 GB.

The transition has not been very smooth, though I don’t blame Windows 7 for that. Since I never bothered with Vista, I have skipped a step and am learning the changes of two versions simultaneously. So it’s mostly my own inexperience.

I plan to blog a few of the problems I encountered. Perhaps they’ll help someone else going through the same thing, or other people might have suggestions or advice for me.

Right now, I have two antivirus packages available for “free” – Norton (through my university), and McAfee (through my cable provider). Since Norton is well-known to be bloatware of the first order, I decided to go with McAfee this time.

All I wanted was an antivirus and software firewall (yes, I know, hardware firewalls are best, but I don’t have one right now). The program gave me no choice to selectively install certain components. As a result, I now have a program that contains features that obviously have nothing to do with antivirus and firewall functions (such as a disk backup utility, a “quickclean” utility, parental controls for blocking dirty websites), as well as other features that are only marginally useful to me (such as Privacy Guard for protecting personal information, email and instant messenger protection).

So when I run McAfee, I have 7 different McAfee-related processes running, using up a total of 172 MB of memory. All the time my computer is on. 172 MB lost to me forever. Here’s the proof:

172 MB of memory, just for a firewall and antivirus. Not the best one around either, at least not according to web reviews I’ve read. A poorly updated program at that, with one of the lowest frequencies of virus-definition updates. What were these people thinking?

I can understand that part of the problem is just the business model. Both Norton and McAfee have been around for a very long time, both are among the earliest vendors of antivirus products. Over the years, the desire to go one better than the competition can lead to a sort of arms race, where feature sets keep expanding, more to give reviewers something to talk about than for any actual benefit they provide to the end user. But the software industry is no longer new. People are less easily impressed by vast feature sets and more easily upset by bloat. Look at the success of Google, with its minimalistic interface. So even if this sort of arms race was justification once upon a time, it certainly isn’t now.

I wonder what holds them back from simply offering two separate versions of their software. A lean, stripped down version with just the anti-virus / anti-spyware / firewall features, and another with all the bells and whistles. Perhaps they are afraid that the lean version will cut into the sales of the bigger version, and they won’t be able to justify the higher price?

Alternatively, what about just selling the more expensive version with all the extras, but allowing the user at install time to selectively install only the feature set he needs? I know plenty of people (including myself) who would pay extra to buy a basic antivirus from McAfee rather than some unknown company. Not that this proves that the McAfee product is better, it’s just name recognition. Based on the vague idea that a well-established company with good cash flow ought to be better able to hire a staff that can keep the virus definitions updated.

At this point, I have decided to switch to either BitDefender or Kaspersky. I haven’t used either of those programs before, but they seem to have consistently good reviews from the press.

The antivirus / computer security market might be up for a shakeup soon. Microsoft announced that they will discontinue their Live OneCare service (their current antivirus / firewall offering) and instead offer a free security service to all Windows users. This will be based on the same Morro engine that’s currently used in OneCare, which has already passed all major security certifications. It will be part of a new design philosophy of keeping the antivirus engine lean and efficient. According to their press release:

Windows Live OneCare, one of the first all-in-one suites to be launched in the consumer market, includes a number of non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tune-up. By shifting to focus on the core anti-malware features that most consumers still don’t keep up to date, “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats.

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for non-bloat software, but if this is true, it sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for. Supposedly, this new service will go live in the second half of this year, and will be available free to all users of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

I wonder how this will affect the “security suite” market. Microsoft certainly has the muscle to make its presence felt, and there are few more powerful selling points to the consumers’ mind than “free”. It should certainly make other manufacturers refocus their efforts. I can’t imagine McAfee getting very far if they say “buy our software, we throw in a disk backup utility!” People would then wonder if they really need a backup utility, whether they want it running all the time as part of their antivirus program. And since they can get the antivirus and firewall free from Microsoft anyway, they are really looking at McAfee’s $39.95 offering as what they pay for a backup utility. The competition then, for McAfee, would not simply be antivirus vendors, but rather disk utilities vendors as well. I have the feeling that this is not a winning strategy, and such extras will fall by the wayside.

I think the focus instead will be something like “we offer more complete protection”. This will be a hard thing to prove, unless Microsoft does an uncommonly poor job with Morro. A-V tests are a dime a dozen, and many of them mean little, being biased by the source of the sponsoring cash and the personal feelings of the tester. Perhaps this will encourage more scientific testing of antivirus software. But I can already imagine that the bigger selling point that many vendors will automatically jump to is bigger and better “extras” – things like privacy guard, spam filters, cookie management tools, anti-porno filters for people with kids, etc. This is what manufacturers will use to justify why people ought to give them money instead of just downloading the free software from Microsoft.

I am still hoping that a niche remains for antivirus vendors who provide lean and efficient security software that does exactly what you expect from security software and nothing more, and that uses minimal memory and CPU resources.