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UPGRADE to version 9.0 of Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac HE

bobcook

Hi everyone,

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac version 9.0 Home Edition is available: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx

The headline feature for version 9.0 is Web Protection, offering protection to make web browsing safe. This is the same technology used by our corporate customers, learn more from our website: http://www.sophos.com/en-us/why-sophos/innovative-technology/web-protection.aspx

We've also worked hard to improve the existing features with a number of security and stability fixes. Version 9.0 supports Mac OS X 10.6 and up. This means we've discontinued support for all PowerPC systems and 10.4/10.5 Intel systems going forward.

You can upgrade an existing version 8 installation, or set up a brand new installation with the same installer. Either way, just download and run the installer app. Today you need to "opt-in" by manually running the installer to upgrade yourself, but later this year we'll migrate all version 8 installations automatically.

If you find problems, please post about it here. If you don't have any problems we'd also love to hear that too. If you find a showstopper issue, please let us know and then reinstall version 8 until we can fix it (the installer for version 8 is also still available from our website).

Regarding the Web Protection feature, you can test the two different types of protection with these two links:

URL reputation blocking: http://www.sophostest.com/ then click the "Malware" link about half-way down the page

Malicious content blocking: http://www.eicar.org/download/eicar_com.zip

In both cases, you will get a notification page instead of the real content when the protection features are enabled in the preferences.

Thanks for using our product, keep sending feedback.

:1012896


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  • 0

    To add to what I posted in Message #19, I've seen other publishers who use pop-up windows to announce updates offer the option to "Remind me later" or "I'll skip this update." If you change the skip option to "Don't remind me again," you give the user control over your pop-ups in general and give them the option to stop the pop-ups altogether. And, in the pop-up window, you could also include the link to this forum as a source for staying on top of future update news; that'll increase the traffic here since it's likely that most Sophos users don't know this forum exists.

    Further, while auto update might run at some unexpected and inconvenient time (I always force the first update at startup to avoid that), Sophos runs as a startup process and the pop-up could appear when system boot is finished.

    :1015699
  • 0

    Hello,

    I'm a satisfied user and promoter of Sophos. I recently installed version 9.0 and found that loading ALL web pages and any rich text email (photos or graphics) suddenly became very slow, i.e. almost to a grinding halt! However when I opened the Web Protection tab in Sophos Preferences and turned off the "Block access to malicious websites..." section, loading speed returned to normal.

    Obviously, the feature is a good one to have, but are you aware of this problem and if so, is it likely to be fixed?

    FYI, I'm running updated OS X Mavericks on an early 2011 Macbook Pro 17" 2.3Ghz I7 with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.

    Jeff

    :1015895
  • 0

    Hi MacVegan,

    There are quite a few reports similar to what you describe although the reasons are varied. Does the performance change if you only turn off one of the two options, rather than both? Trying to figure out which type of problem is affecting you (and the two features work very differently).

    :1015897
  • 0

    It's only the first one I turned off.

    "Block malicious downloads from websites..." is still turned on.

    :1015899
  • 0

    There's a detailed explanation by Bob Cook in this thread which gives an idea of what's going on under the hood with Web Protection, which is quite a bit. I had some thoughts on the internet security balancing act in post #6 here, but the Cliff's Notes version is what the oil change ads used to say: "you can pay me now or pay me later."

    :1015901
  • 0

    I've turned the web protection switch back on, after several days, and pages seem to be loading a little faster (5 sec on average).

    However, I've also noticed that it is not updating every hour as selected in preferences. And when I click "Update Now", a pop up says it's up to date, but the last checked time is always showing the same date and time (now over two days ago).

    Any info on that?

     
    :1015913
  • 0
    MacVegan wrote:

    However, I've also noticed that it is not updating every hour as selected in preferences. And when I click "Update Now", a pop up says it's up to date, but the last checked time is always showing the same date and time (now over two days ago). 

    Yep this is an issue that is resolved in 9.0.8 (should be rolled out for the home edition users next Tuesday). In the meantime, "force quit" the Sophos AutoUpdate process. It will restart and return itself to normal (at least for a while).

    This was a really interesting bug that took a while to find and squash. We believe we've finally nailed it.

    :1015915
  • 0

    DO I need to uninstall version 8 before installing version 9?

    :1015955
  • 0
    redoak wrote:

    DO I need to uninstall version 8 before installing version 9?

    Nope. Just run the new installer, it will migrate everything for you automagically.

    :1015959