Norton Neo Browser

25 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by phantomathkg

51 Comments

eknkc

7 hours ago

I wouldn’t use an immortality serum if it came with Norton branding. How come it is still a thing?

7734128

8 hours ago

If they were not using actual Norton trademarks I would have thought this was a parody.

Why would anyone use Norton? It's just malware.

bbarn

8 hours ago

It's definitely one of the saddest stories in our industry. Peter Norton's books literally taught me to program as a teenager, and now his name is synonymous with mal/bloatware.

cagey

3 hours ago

And I loved "Norton Commander" and to this day use GUI'fied (and TUI: Midnight Commander) incarnations of it.

embedding-shape

7 hours ago

It is sad to again and again be reminded that even the ones we see as heroes earlier in our lives, could do something to kind of "tarnish" our idea of them. I think lately I've gotten better at handling coming across this, as I'm getting better at realizing we're all just humans, and what we see from these public people is often just a small selected slice, we're all flawed in our ways, but we typically don't get to see those unless it's something extreme, one way or another.

Many cases of this happening too, people loved and celebrated for years/decades, then does something that just absolutely tarnishes everything they would have been remembered for. Philippe Pétain comes to mind as an extreme example, one of France's greatest national heroes up until late in his life, he became head of the Vichy regime and collaborated closely with Nazi Germany.

thenewnewguy

7 hours ago

Comparing Norton selling their company (even to a scummy owner like Symantec) to Pétain collaborating with Nazi Germany feels a bit ... extreme ... to me.

user

7 hours ago

[deleted]

corgi192

7 hours ago

it's also John McAfee innit

girvo

7 hours ago

I associate him more with MDPV-derived psychosis, personally.

specialist

7 hours ago

Me too.

It'd be nice if shoutouts included time spans, thusly:

"In my travels, I always had my copies of Norton [1981-1989] books and utilities."

I respect any artist (creator) that manages to get paid, so I don't begrudge the sale/merger with Symantic. It's just too bad Things Fall Apart because number must go up.

jasomill

an hour ago

This.

I'll never begrduge anyone for "selling out" until I'm given a similar opportunity to do so myself.

Peter Norton clearly had interests other than running a software company, and I can't say I blame him.

Speaking as a fan of Norton's books and utilities in the DOS era.

embedding-shape

8 hours ago

I'm similarly lost here.

If this is Norton, why wouldn't they be aware of how people see the very name "Norton", and avoid slapping it on any new products?

If this is NOT Norton, same applies, why would you include a term that almost causes gag-reflexes among large parts of your supposed audience?

msm_

7 hours ago

Maybe they actually do know their audience, and HN crowd is just... not that audience? I am pretty sure most people have no idea what's wrong with Norton, and the name just sounds vaguely like cybersecurity.

sparkling

7 hours ago

100%. Anything with the name "Norton" is burned for me. This goes back to uninstallable Software around Windows XP era.

user2722

8 hours ago

Don't forget privacy policy.

Norton is owned by Avast owner which sold data for ads.

lucideer

8 hours ago

We've come a long way if people are being warned off Norton on account of its association with Avast.

(in my day we were warning people off Avast on account of its similarities to Norton)

vavkamil

7 hours ago

The parent company is Gen Digital now, and its product line is: Norton / Avast / AVG / Avira / CCleaner

I have no idea why anyone would install and use their browser.

9dev

7 hours ago

I moved out of the windows world a long time ago. Are virus scanners still a thing? Like, not just a revenue stream, but something you really should run?

yonatan8070

7 hours ago

I don't think anybody actually installs them on purpose. A lot of systems come with McAfee (Lenovo) or others pre-installed.

Interesting point, I've even has a Lenovo Legion and some ThinkBooks install McAfee autonomously after I installed Windows 11 Pro.

In enterprise environments it's a different story, McAfee and the like have similarly named products for the enterprise which actually do useful things for corporate security (like blocking unauthorized USB devices, blocking unauthorized software, reporting incidents to a central SOC system, etc.)

user2722

6 hours ago

I do install them. This day only ClamAV I guess. I used (paid for) ESET Linux before they cancelled their Linux consumer line.

On the fence about trying Kaspersky AV Linux. Wouldn't install their suite on Windows though, last I looked at it hooked too many places, causing weird bugs and slowing everything down. Less bad than Comodo, which was able to bork Cygwin, but still.

msm_

5 hours ago

In home environment: no, because Windows Defender is pretty good now. Some people install other antimalware solutions, but there's no great reason to do it.

In enterprise environment: definitely, for both compliance, management and actual security reasons.

seabombs

7 hours ago

AVAST VIRUS DATABASE HAS BEEN UPDATED.

Blasting out my PC speakers at 2am...

hollowturtle

7 hours ago

Hard to find a site this less interesting, for a product this less interesting from a company that i would never trust

maximevince

7 hours ago

The only good Norton is Norton Commander!

rzzzt

7 hours ago

Were the motorbikes bad?

defrost

6 hours ago

Epic. My aunt had a 1st gen Norton Model 77 Dominator in the later part of the 1950s as a wheatbelt paddock basher and offroad cross country beast.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Model_77_Dominator

500cc version of this reviewed 600cc variation: https://www.classicbikehub.uk/buying-guide/article/norton-mo...

By all reports a sound bike, save for some quirk that might fire both cylinders on the first catch giving a starting kick from zero to rocket in under unprepared reaction time.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight-twin_engine

They had a lot of models, some were famous for racing and hill climbs.

utopiah

7 hours ago

Chromium based, not open source.

m00dy

7 hours ago

yeah, I think I can vibecode it under a week.

rock_artist

7 hours ago

Norton is very heated in the comments here. But even separating this concern.

Personally, the landing page itself hurts my trust of the goal.

Why?

When we think of a browser, before anything. We want something that feels snappy and performant. Even if the browser IS snappy. the fact that this page feels unresponsive in a way on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. already raises concerns of performance.

For my sanity, I've tried Vivaldi's website, Brave's website. All feels "light" and scrolling is a breeze on Safari.

Those are just my few cents, but I'm pretty sure others might feel the same when making a landing page for any product where it should feel responsive.

OroPla

6 hours ago

What an evil website. Just navigating to it deleted the history, so I couldn't navigate back to hackernews. Ctrl+L wouldn't highlight the navigation bar, either and instead closed the tab.

fai5a1

6 hours ago

The scrolljacking website is so annoying. That alone is enough to deter me from this product.

d3Xt3r

8 hours ago

Of all the new things in 2026, I wasn't expecting friking Norton coming out with a web browser. Too bad that it's yet another Chromium skin, with integrated AI that no one asked for.

Not that I expected any better from Norton tbh, but it's a shame to see a beloved brand from my childhood days fall so far from grace. Norton Utilities for DOS/Win9x used to be the bomb... NCD, NDD, SPEEDISK etc. My last good memory of it was introducing me to Darude Sandstorm. But now... sigh.

andrea76

7 hours ago

I really miss the times of Pete's Norton Utilities for DOS.

OroPla

6 hours ago

Windows was a mistake I blame Apple for.

lthi747

7 hours ago

The only useful norton software was the Norton Ghost

cheschire

7 hours ago

Doesn’t Brave offer most of those features?

user

8 hours ago

[deleted]

sreekanth850

7 hours ago

i don't need all this shit, can i have a modern browser that run in 10 mb ram and doesnt multiply the memory with tabs. something like kmelon but works on all sites.

suck-my-spez

8 hours ago

Quite a lot in their privacy policy for a “private” browser

sajithdilshan

7 hours ago

So everyone is upvoting this post to shit on Norton?

herrherrmann

7 hours ago

I guess it’s good to warn about bad actors early and throughly!

fortyseven

7 hours ago

Given the reputation, who the hell is the audience for this crap?

yonatan8070

7 hours ago

People who have Norton pre-installed to install it for them, probably.

I wonder what Microslop would think if a pre-installed antivirus decided to set this browser as the default over Edge.

wiether

7 hours ago

I know that the current state of affairs with the AI labs bros can make the old antivirus villains look like lambs; still, I don't see how anyone would like to have anything to do with those guys.

miohtama

8 hours ago

Would you trust this company?

Symantec / Norton:

• Longstanding consumer complaints about aggressive upselling, scare-style scan warnings, auto-renewal, and hard-to-cancel billing

• Product often came preinstalled on PCs; many users treated it as unwanted bloatware

• Mixed reputation: lab detection scores often decent; customer-service and billing scores often poor

• 2011–2016 class action (Symantec and Digital River): alleged hidden “download insurance” / extended download service added at checkout; settled for about $60 million

• Canadian class action over alleged defects in an older Norton “decomposer” component (software sold roughly 2010–2016); later settled for tens of millions

• 2013–2022 Columbia University patent case: jury found willful infringement of malware-related patents and awarded $185 million; case later settled

• False Claims Act / GSA contracting: Symantec accused of hiding extra commercial discounts from the U.S. government; 2023 trial findings plus a 2024 Gen Digital payment of $55.1 million to satisfy the judgment LifeLock (bought by Symantec in 2016; later NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital)

• 2010 FTC settlement: about $12 million for deceptive identity-theft advertising

• 2015 FTC action: about $100 million after LifeLock violated the 2010 order (weak security program and more false claims)

• Recurring criticism that protection/reimbursement marketing overstated what the service actually did

• 2022–2023 credential-stuffing attacks on Norton Password Manager / LifeLock logins using reused passwords from other breaches; company said its own systems were not hacked; thousands of accounts had some personal data accessed and hundreds of thousands of logins were targeted

NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital

• 2021–2022 Norton Crypto: Ethereum miner bundled with Norton 360; company said it was opt-in and took a cut; users and researchers criticized it as inappropriate in a security product; later dropped

• Ongoing complaints about subscription renewals, refunds, and support after the Symantec → NortonLifeLock → Gen Digital rebrands

• Privacy/tracking investigations (alleged sharing of site/app data with third-party analytics such as Quantum Metric); not a final court finding

• Separate consumer suits alleging LifeLock failed to alert users or honor “dollar-for-dollar” identity-theft reimbursement promises

ryan-c

7 hours ago

This was dead. Not sure why, but vouched, it's relevant.