I recently started using McAfee SiteAdvisor, which is a free program and service from McAfee, makers of one of the common security suites.
This program works in conjunction with your web browser (Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and maybe others). When you go to a web site, McAfee SiteAdvisor’s logo (which it embeds into your web browser’s display, shows green or red. Red means that it has had some bad reports about the site. It also will classify any search results when you use Google to search the web. One side effect of this, of course, is that you’re telling McAfee where you go and for what you search. Their privacy statement, however, says that they don’t retain this information.
Note that a red warning in McAfee SiteAdvisor does NOT necessarily mean that the site installs malware — I noted one site that was classified as red because of the "shopping experience." It’s misleading for a security firm to put out a tool that classifies for reasons other than malware — but, that’s not what my gripe is about.
While I was initially impressed with the program and its results (and relieved to see that my sites were classified with the green OK symbol), recently McAfee upgraded the program. This was an automatic upgrade with no warning to me (not an acceptable practice) and also changed the location of the SiteAdvisor indicator in the Firefox web browser that I use.
Formerly, the SiteAdvisor indicator was in the Firefox status bar, which doubles as the bottom border of the Firefox window.
In this update, McAfee decided that I needed a new toolbar in Firefox — a toolbar that was the full width of the Firefox window that contained nothing more than the SiteAdviser indicator and a pulldown indicator for configuration options. Of course, even the Disable SiteAdvisor did nothing more than change the color of the indicator.
Defending their right to control my web browser, McAfee decided that I could not use Firefox’s View command to disable the SiteAdviser toolbar. They allow me to install it. They allow me to turn off the SiteAdvisor function. But, they force me to waste space in my web browser window by inserting a full-width toolbar into Firefox. By the way, they don’t allow me to insert any other functions on that toolbar or to move the toolbar.
Thanks, but not thanks. I uninstalled McAfee SiteAdvisor at that point by using Add and Remove Programs (in the Windows Control Panel).
Then, I ran Optimize 2.0 and found all the junk that this one McAfee program left in my computer and didn’t uninstall. Optimize 2.0 handled it for me as well as recommending and handling more optimization changes based on my notebook and my ISP’s current performance.
Read more and see what Optimize 2.0 found and changed in this week’s online issue article Another Look at Optimize 2.0 – Five Months Later.
and