Good, but where's a complete bundle?
Pros:
adequate bundle, especially if you already have Norton Utilities.
Cons:
virus scanning good, not perfect. Norton program bundles a bit confusing. Slows system startup down.
The Bottom Line:
Good firewall, good antivirus, integrates well with OS X and other Norton programs. However, outclassed in performance and features by competing suites.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Norton Internet Security (NIS) for Macintosh 3.0 bundles the Norton Personal Firewall (PF) for Mac with Norton Antivirus for Mac. Both products provide excellent protection in their respective categories - PF is much easier to configure than the built in firewall program on OS X, while NAV for Mac has long been one of the best antivirus products for Mac, while many others have fallen by the wayside.
Both products integrate on the system through the Norton Launcher, which allows you to access any Norton program installed on your system - Norton Utilities, Disk Doctor, etc. - at least eight discrete Norton programs are available this way, as long as they're installed. On all the Mac systems I support (5 in the office, plus a few out of the office) the programs work as advertised - as long as the AV is kept up to date (Liveupdate, via the scheduler, will update the antivirus (and other programs) daily, weekly, or monthly, although Symantec generally releases its AV updates once per month) you'll be protected against current Mac viruses, and you'll be able to keep your Mac from transmitting windows viruses attached to emails.
The one weakness in the AV scanning is on email. Windows PCs have for some time now been vulnerable to emails written in HTML where the virus is embedded in the email, and not sent as an attachment; as NAV for Mac only scans attachments, and not the email content itself, the Mac may be protected from the email, but could still be a carrier for a Windows virus should someone unknowingly forward it to a friend on a Windows PC.
This suite is useful if you only have Norton Utilities for Mac; if you already have Norton Systemworks for Mac, then you already have the antivirus program and can skip the Internet Security bundle, simply buying Norton Personal Firewall instead. The bundle I'd really like to see from Symantec would be an "Internet Systemworks", with the utilities, firewall, and antivirus in one package.
Update (September 2004): The one area I've found where Norton Personal Firewall could use improvement is in program control. While the firewall effectively stealths ports against inbound connections and regulates traffic at the port level, it does not provide the outbound application control provided by Windows firewall programs such as ZoneAlarm. This can be added by separate Mac applications such as Internet Cleanup from Allume (formerly Alladin Systems), but program control and greater features are available in Intego's (www.intego.com) NetBarrier firewall for Mac.
Update 2 (December 2004): A second area of improvement would be in the impact on system performance. I recently had to rebuilt one of my users' Macs due to hard drive failure. With a standard install of OS 10.3.5 and applications prior to installing NIS3 on this system (800Mhz G4, 512MB RAM) the startup time was 45 seconds. Installing NIS3 doubled the startup time to 1 minute 30 seconds. As this was a rather remarkable impact, I decided to look at other options, and now recommend Intego Internet Security, as the performance impact is much less (only 5-10 seconds additional startup time over the base startup time.)
