Have you ever ran a windows machine without all this stupid virus/malware software running? It's dramatically faster. Anti-malware/virus software was a stupid road to go down, the proper solution is to have better security on the machine.
On your comment: > the proper solution is to have better security on the machine.
Strongly disagree; if you look at this MacDefender issue, there is no flaw in OSX that is causing infection, users are installing it on their own accord. But what anti-malware/virus software can do here is warn or prevent the user from installing this in the first place, as it should detect the virus/malware signature.
This is why you need it even if the underlying OS is secure, to try protect users from themselves.
I run several things on both Windows and Mac. The Mac version feels a lot faster. If I shut off all the virus stuff the windows stuff is still slower but not as dramatic. It depends on what the code does, obviously. Any disk or network read/writes take a hit so if you're doing a lot of those it really adds up.
>Strongly disagree; if you look at this MacDefender issue, there is no flaw in OSX that is causing infection, users are installing it on their own accord.
The solution to this is what Apple has already started doing: provide just one place for these kinds of people to get software. Just buy it in the App store. That is the proper approach to "protect users from themselves", not put a 20-30% performance penalty on all Macs.
I agree with you on the App Store front, think it will help to reduce viruses/malware (I think Windows 8 app store will be a huge win too), but it's unlikely that an app store will be the sole place to get software for some time to come. So until it's impossible to manually install software off the internet, I think we're going to need anti-malware/virus software.
I am totally on board with the fact that there are some programs that do this - Norton's suite of anti-malware programs is basically regarded as malware itself. And it even comes preinstalled on a lot of computers.
But other programs work without a hitch.
Flashblock (or AdBlock/Ad Muncher/NoScript) also slows down my browser, but I can't be annoyed at an infinitesimal allocation of my resources to the extension.