Norton Confidential - Browse Safely But Don't Expect Much Else

Norton Confidential provides a suite of features to make browsing the Internet safer. These include a password manager, two kinds of scam site filters (Phishing and Criminal), and overall security monitoring, such as checking whether antivirus software is up to date. Unfortunately, as you will see later, these sometimes do not work as intended.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must inform you that I am employed by Microsoft, which some people may see as a competitor to Symantec in some areas (my particular department is not involved in any space in which Symantec is also involved). So take my review with whatever grain of salt you wish.

For this review, I purchased a brand-new copy of Norton Confidential from an online store. The copy I received did not support Vista, and would not install on Vista, even though information on the Symantec website would seem to make that claim. After a more careful check of the website, I found that the "Vista compatibility" claim was amended with some very fine print stating, "A future update for Vista may be available after Vista releases." So, eight months after the release of Vista, I have purchased a product claiming to support Vista, and it won’t even install on Vista. After further investigation of the Symantec site, I did find a version of Norton Confidential for Vista (version 1.5) that I could download. In the end, I did get Norton Confidential up and working on Vista, but the time I had to expend to get to that point could have been better spent on reviewing the software than on surfing to find the right version. One last issue of note on the subject of Vista: Norton Confidential supports Windows Vista 32-bit, and Windows XP, of course, but it does not support the 64-bit versions of Windows.

Norton Confidential does gives you more than just password management; it offers a feature set that helps protect you while browsing by notifying you of phishing websites (websites that pretend to be from a company or organization when in fact they are not, in an attempt to get personal information such as credit card numbers or bank account information). It also protects you from applications that attempt to read data out of web forms as you fill them (what Symantec refers to as "Crimeware"). These are good tools that address browsing safety holistically.

Unfortunately for Norton Confidential, the password management features did not work well, marring the overall appeal of the product. I describe this in more detail later in this review.

Documentation is also scarce. Norton Confidential includes a print copy of a manual as well as a soft copy in PDF format. Unfortunately, this was not very useful, as I will discuss later.

Finally, Norton Confidential also does not include the one feature provided by almost every other package that does web password management--form fill. Providing a secure form filler, which gives users the ability to securely input information such as credit card numbers, would have given this package a minor leg up, in my estimation.

What's Hot:
For $50, you get a suite of functionality that extends beyond web password management into secure browsing overall.

What's Not:
Much of the advertised functionality did not work or did not work well.

What's Hot:
Once I located the correct version for Windows Vista, installation went smoothly, installing Norton Commander and two services for auto-update of the product.

What's Not:
Installation took a surprisingly long time compared to other products in this category.

What's Hot:
Norton Confidential helps you browse safely by identifying sites that are dangerous. Its monitoring tools alert you to phishing and criminal websites that may be trying to steal your data. Both filters integrated well with the browser and became a natural part of the browsing experience, without impacting performance or usability.

Norton Confidential can automatically detect when you enter passwords into a web page and it offers to save those passwords for future use. Norton Confidential was able to detect and save passwords for all the sites I used to evaluate the product with.

In addition, Norton Confidential will monitor aspects of your system's overall security, such as the presence of antivirus (AV) software, and will let you know if the AV signatures are up to date.

What's Not:
When logging into a site for the first time, Norton Confidential would generally offer to save the password, but not always. For Yahoo, I had to go back, wait, and then reenter the password for Norton to offer to capture it.

When entering a page that needed a login for which Norton Confidential had already saved the password, the software did not reliably fill in the information. It would either work, not work at all, or work only after ten to 15 seconds had passed.

And failures were quite common; I could not determine what caused Norton Confidential to fail to fill in account information, nor why sometimes it would only do so after several long seconds. The net effect though is that the password management functionality was rendered useless, as I would end up just putting the information in manually to get on to what I wanted to do. I couldn’t get the capturing of Windows credentials to work at all.

What's Hot:
The user interface for Norton Commander is well polished and does a good job of integrating with the browser.  I never felt like I was working with a completely different application, nor did I find it difficult to navigate around the product.

What's Not:
There isn't much in the interface not to love.

What's Hot:
Norton is a trusted vendor of security-related products.  Although there are no configuration options for how data is encrypted, I have confidence that Norton Commander is doing it properly.


What's Not:
For a security product that aims to protect your privacy by warning you of suspicious websites, I was surprised to find that Norton Confidential did not regard my data as private when installing the program.  During installation, Norton Confidential asks for personal information, and does not allow you to continue until you provide it. It does not tell you what this information will be used for.  Additionally, Norton Confidential opts you in to sending information back to Symantec for several of its features, without asking or otherwise notifying you of what it is doing. You can go into configuration and change these settings, but you have to go looking for such settings yourself.

What's Hot:
The product does include a paper manual to help get the product installed, as well as online help to assist with the operating of the product itself. The quality of the documentation is average--about what I would expect for a product of this nature.

Symantec should focus mainly on getting the existing functionality in Norton Confidential to work correctly before adding new features. If Symantec can do that, I believe it will have a very good product offering.