When I first installed ESET Internet Security back in November 2017, everything was fine. I didn't notice any degradation in performance at all. But over the past couple of months, I have been experiencing serious performance hits with Firefox Quantum 58.0.2 x64.
My system is Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64.
Hardware is MSI P67A with Intel i5 2500, 16GB DDR3 @ 1600Mhz
Windows is installed on a partition on a Samsung 850 EVO SSD.
There are no issues with the SSD or other storage in the system.
In ESET, HTTPS checking was being performed on port 443 only. That was the default.
With default settings in ESET, it can take 15 seconds or more to load a page in Firefox; especially when I open that page for the first time after clearing the cache (which I do frequently).
Even sites that I have always trusted, and are in my bookmarks (so I know that I am going to the genuine site) take a long time to load.
This morning, I said that's enough. I'm not going to tolerate this any longer. So I disabled ESET's HTTPS checking. Now, sites load quickly.
I am absolutely willing to give up that level of security if it means that my browsing is going to be a more pleasant experience.
I had never experienced this sort of delay opening websites in Firefox when I was running Norton products, which I had been using prior to switching to ESET. I now have a 2-year subscription to ESET Internet security, and I'm beginning to think I made a mistake to buy the 2-year plan. Had I not, I would probably be going back to Norton this year.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the hundreds of times I had to deal with ESET throwing "Untrusted Certificate" warnings at me when I visited sites that I trusted. When inspecting the certificate that ESET was warning me about, I found them to be current by date, so I don't know what ESET was complaining about.
Next time I get one of those I will be sure to post it here, but I really don't think that is necessary, since so many other users have posted theirs, and they are pretty much what I have been seeing.
Being a careful and observant person, I really do not believe I need the HTTPS checking feature in ESET. But regardless, I am not going to tolerate the poor performance of Firefox to have it.
FW