On Jit was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference that macOS 11, also known as Big Sur, will be released this year. ClamXav wraps an OS X GUI around an open-source command line tool, which explains the brushed metal look and the small, non-standard buttons and fonts. If you don’t want to spend the money on Norton Antivirus or VirusBarrier X4, ClamXav is worth considering, as long as you’re aware of its limitations and quirks.ĮDITOR’S NOTE: This version of ClamXav is no longer available, as it’s been superseded by by 1.0.3, which we cover in this review. Macworld’s buying adviceĭespite its user interface issues and slow scanning speed, ClamXav will provide a good level of protection for the typical user, and you can’t beat its price.
#CLAMXAV OS X FULL#
A search for Leap-A, for instance, returned one line, simply listing “.” By contrast, Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus ( ) has a full page of Leap.A information, including screenshots. Unfortunately, the data you find there may be light on details. If you want more information about malware the program finds, you’ll have to navigate to the Clamav homepage, where you’ll find a searchable database of virus information. Drag-and-drop scanning isn’t supported, so you’ll have to navigate through a dialog box each time you want to scan a folder. Its buttons and fonts aren’t what you’ve come to expect in a OS X app.
Clamxav Mac FreeĪs you might expect from its price, ClamXav doesn’t have the polished look and feel of some of its commercial competitors. And while the useful ClamXav Sentry app will scan folders and files in real time, it only worked some of the time in my testing-occasionally it spotted a test virus file immediately, but other times it missed it altogether. Unlike other, more polished antivirus apps, ClamXav won’t keep track of which folders it’s already scanned, so re-scanning the same folder will take just as long the second time as it did the first. The program wasn’t fast about it, though: It took more than an hour and a half to scan our 13GB application folder, which Intego VirusBarrier ( ), for example, scanned in 13 minutes. ClamXav did a good job scanning my test system’s hard drive, finding all the malware we threw at it. You can easily schedule scans via the built-in scheduler (though you should note that a scheduled scan failed to run when I intentionally put the Mac to sleep at the chosen time).
#CLAMXAV OS X UPDATE#
It costs nothing to buy or update (though the author does request donations), so ClamXav is about as cheap as it gets.įor the price, it’s a pretty capable virus scanner. It’s based on a well-established open source project (clamav), and provides a decent level of protection (thanks in part to daily updates of its virus definitions). If you don’t think the virus threat to your Mac is dire enough to spend any money protecting against it, ClamXav will get the job done.
Mac antivirus products come in two main flavors.Some focus solely on the Mac platform, while others, like Norton 360 Deluxe (for Mac), are simply the macOS manifestation of a multi-platform product.
#CLAMXAV OS X FREE#
Free is hard to beat, though, and while ClamXav. ClamXav 1.1 is an able antivirus program that will keep your Mac protected, though it doesn’t offer all the features that more-expensive programs do. While it's no longer free, its one-time pricing makes it quite a bargain. ClamXAV (for Mac) wraps this antivirus technology in an easy-to-use Mac antivirus app.