It's definitely one of the saddest stories in our industry. Peter Norton's books literally taught me to program as a teenager, and now his name is synonymous with mal/bloatware.
It is sad to again and again be reminded that even the ones we see as heroes earlier in our lives, could do something to kind of "tarnish" our idea of them. I think lately I've gotten better at handling coming across this, as I'm getting better at realizing we're all just humans, and what we see from these public people is often just a small selected slice, we're all flawed in our ways, but we typically don't get to see those unless it's something extreme, one way or another.
Many cases of this happening too, people loved and celebrated for years/decades, then does something that just absolutely tarnishes everything they would have been remembered for. Philippe Pétain comes to mind as an extreme example, one of France's greatest national heroes up until late in his life, he became head of the Vichy regime and collaborated closely with Nazi Germany.
Comparing Norton selling their company (even to a scummy owner like Symantec) to Pétain collaborating with Nazi Germany feels a bit ... extreme ... to me.
Maybe they actually do know their audience, and HN crowd is just... not that audience? I am pretty sure most people have no idea what's wrong with Norton, and the name just sounds vaguely like cybersecurity.
I moved out of the windows world a long time ago. Are virus scanners still a thing? Like, not just a revenue stream, but something you really should run?
I don't think anybody actually installs them on purpose. A lot of systems come with McAfee (Lenovo) or others pre-installed.
Interesting point, I've even has a Lenovo Legion and some ThinkBooks install McAfee autonomously after I installed Windows 11 Pro.
In enterprise environments it's a different story, McAfee and the like have similarly named products for the enterprise which actually do useful things for corporate security (like blocking unauthorized USB devices, blocking unauthorized software, reporting incidents to a central SOC system, etc.)
Of all the new things in 2026, I wasn't expecting friking Norton coming out with a web browser. Too bad that it's yet another Chromium skin, with integrated AI that no one asked for.
Not that I expected any better from Norton tbh, but it's a shame to see a beloved brand from my childhood days fall so far from grace. Norton Utilities for DOS/Win9x used to be the bomb... NCD, NDD, SPEEDISK etc. My last good memory of it was introducing me to Darude Sandstorm. But now... sigh.
i don't need all this shit, can i have a modern browser that run in 10 mb ram and doesnt multiply the memory with tabs. something like kmelon but works on all sites.
I know that the current state of affairs with the AI labs bros can make the old antivirus villains look like lambs; still, I don't see how anyone would like to have anything to do with those guys.
