Nor does have to be or for GW users should it become. WFC is WFC. GW is GW. Two completely different market segments. It’s like you posted up all that hot air and useless lecturing about supercars in an SUV forum. Duh.
Anyhow…
For my personal Windows systems over nearly two decades it’s been the offerings from Sunbelt, Online Armor (Tall Emu & Emsisoft), Comodo and lastly the one bundled in Bitdefender Intenet Security, the latter with Glasswire Free. And I sure do miss Malware Defender which took up the largest swath of that timeline. Now it’s just Windows and GW Pro. In that time I also dabbled with firewalls in the enterprise, client and server side. I have certifications in Windows, Apple, Unix, Novell and AwCrap. Outside of business I’ve been online since a 110 baud acoustic modem, a C=64 and BBSs and FidoNet.
Firewalls have for many years now been marketed as a hybrid solution, wrapping network traffic (IPs and ports) with or without one or several or all of HIPS, behavior blocking, IDS and so on. The misunderstanding of this marketing has progressed to the point where current discussions on “firewall” have the same context as “vehicle” would have in a motorsports forum.
The protections presented by a network traffic firewall are no longer effective against the most dangerous players in the threat landscape. While a meticulously and expertly configured firewall can be a front line weapon, like restricting a POP or IMAP client to server IP addresses and ports, and who has that expertise? I do but I’m not going run that by Aunt Petunia nor am I going to configure that in her system.
All that said, Windows Firewall is a perfectly good network firewall and left on its own provides great network protection. As well, the recent (relative to Windows’ history) addition of the Network Inspection Service (NisSRV.exe) “Helps guard against intrusion attempts targeting known and newly discovered vulnerabilities in network protocols.”
For me, the ability to block with one click applications that “phone out” for no reason is GW’s #1 feature. And even for those that do for a reason, like sihclinet.exe.
The monitoring and reporting are superb. There is hardly a day I don’t check Usage to see what’s up.
As for GW’s GUI, software developers have been backed or bought into the modern/metro/millennium school of UI design of the rigid layout of minimalist data displayed with fancy spread out fonts in vast nondescript monocolor borderless fields and windows with narrow faint or hidden (!) scroll bars and barely-there sizers. I can’t blame developers considering the whining and moaning about apps with “dated” UIs.
PhilipGoddard’s numerous points for expert granularity, discovery and alerts are legitimate but, again, the expertise required is a percentage of a percentage of the market and GW is not it. Not to mention all that is so frowned upon by the screaming “quiet protection” and “install it and forget it” mobs.
Finally, there is the customizable dated ugly highly granular management console of Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (WF.msc) for special stuff. Other than the little flame rules like {Glasswire.app.out_2}, of course, IMHO Glasswire should stay out of there.
In my screenshot you can see where I built my own block for IoT entertainment gear in my home theater.
Glasswire rocks. And though it’s not a “firewall” the one for Android too!
