Thanks for the info. Do you know if the norton confidential dll was fixed specifically? And although the problem seems to have only become visible to some in the past month, I have been battling this problem with the norton confidential dll for nearly a year.
Hi gxh-
Thank you for sharing your information on the forum.
I can confirm that every release of Norton Antiphishing has had performance optimizations for the operations we perform when analyzing web pages.
As Tim suggested, NIS 2009 is our latest consumer product release with the latest version of Norton Antiphishing, and we have indeed worked to minimize the overhead to your browsing experience.
If you are still interested, I suggest upgrading your NIS 2008 to 2009. You can update to the latest version by visiting the Norton Update Center and using your current subscription's product key. If you are keen on staying with your 2008 version and you have not yet installed the "2008.5" version, you may download it directly from here: www.symantec.com/newnis
Since this is a Norton 360 forum, I should say that the same types of optimizations we did for NIS2009 and more will be found in the next version of Norton 360.
Regards,
Matt Powers
Symantec Corp.
@MJP
First of all, I think it's great that the newer versions have serious performance optimizations. This has been the largest frustration in the past (next to the uninstalling process :)).
But, this is not a problem of just a bit slowness that has optimizations in the newer versions, this is a problem of a regression, caused by a Norton update for the older versions. In my opinion this should really be fixed. There are still a lot of people that run older versions and don't know how to upgrade or don't want to upgrade for some reason.
* There used to be no problems, then, all of a sudden, with one update the problems started
* I identified the cause a few days after the problems started, I'm sure Symantec must know the cause of this as well.
Our users sent hundreds of complaints and were angry at us, while the problem lies at Symantec. We quickly worked around the problem when we located it, but I can image some sites are still slow because of this.
This was the proof of concept I made of the exact cause of the problem: http://www.marijnspeelman.nl/norton/nortonslow-poc.html
I hope a Symantec engineer can still take a look at it and fix this.
Note: I haven't tested this lately, so it might be possible that it already is, but looking at the replies here my guess is that it isn't.
Finally, how should one contact Symantec about these kind of technical problems? I tried the chat but the guy totally misunderstood my problem (as he was hitting some random auto response buttons and started to talk about firewall rules he would send me, which I never received). And then I called the helpdesk, where I was first told that it's impossible that this is a Norton problem and after explaning it in detail I was told that while talking she 'just' received an e-mail and repeated everything I just said...There should be some way to get in touch with engineers or people close to engineers.
Anyway, thanks for the reply and I'm really happy this forum exist so Symantec will get more in touch with the community and it's users.
I agree wholeheartedly with the post by marijn; this issue should be fixed by Symantec, as it has been caused by a regression in the NIS code during an update.
We have tried contacting Symantec but all I receive in reply to my incident reports are emails asking if my issue has been resolved. When I say no (very politely), nothing happens, except I get an identical email a week later. Symantec need to differentiate user-end queries from program-related queries, and they need a channel to pass program-related issues to their technical developers. Forums like this are very useful but they don't replace the need for direct contact about specific issues (unless Symantec can get their engineers to answer issues like this via the forum).
Anyway, I can report that we have managed to fix the issue for specific websites by adjusting a bit of code in our Javascript menu (see also marijn's proof of concept page). If anyone reading this needs to fix a Javascript menu that plays up with NIS and IE7, try this: find the bit of code relating to IFRAME and remove the nearby code saying src='x-javascript:false;' or similar code (ours was this line of code: this.Shim.src="javascript:"";"). So far it seems to work, not sure if it results in other issues but I've heard it may cause issues for secure sites with an SSL certificate. Hope that helps any other website developers with the same problem. Merry Christmas all :-)
Message Edited by cazazz on 12-17-2008 10:20 AM
Thanks for the feedback pointing to a workaround. I'm sure that will help some.
I am certain that Symantec are aware of the problems of feedback and that they will not be ignored. That they opened these Forums and that their staff are active in them while also doing their normal jobs is a very valuable exposure for them, of that I'm confident and since I spent my working life in R&D of high tech projects and their conversion to commercial reality and I was always astonished how our customers would not complain about things not working properly except perhaps when I called on them -- one reason why I traveled world wide!
I don't know how Microsoft's TechNet works but I imagine at its best it could be similar to what you would like to see?
Hello thread members-
I appreciate your posts and participation.
I can confirm that some previous versions of our software had issues with the iframe elements with “javascript” src attributes.
We examined the various products that use Norton Antiphishing and believe the following to be true:
These products do not have the iframe issue:
1) NIS 2009
2) N360v2
3) NIS 2008.5
4) NIS 2008 after running LiveUpdate and applying all patches/updates
5) N360v1 prior to applying LiveUpdate patches/updates (e.g. out-of-box install)
6) NIS 2007 prior to applying Live Update patches/updates (e.g. out-of-box install, LU cancelled)
These products do have the iframe issue:
1) N360v1 after all LiveUpdate patches/updates
2) NIS 2008 prior to all LiveUpdate patches/updates (e.g. out-of-box install, LU cancelled)
3) NIS 2007after all LiveUpdate patches/updates
There are update options available for all of the affected products, however be assured that we are actively working on this issue to address in-field products that have not been updated.
Matt Powers
Symantec Corp.
Message Edited by MJP on 12-17-2008 10:55 AM
Message Edited by MJP on 12-17-2008 10:56 AM
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Writing as a user, this is the sort of feeback that is really appreciated and makes this place unique in my experience.
Thanks.
Thanks Matt, very encouraging. That’s just the sort of response we need.
Hi thread members-
I just wanted to update you that this weekend we deployed a configuration update that should resolve the issues with iframe elements using a "javascript false" src attribute (with a colon separating javascript and false - the HTML editor of this forum seems to scrub that out!). This update may be obtained through Live Update.
This configuration update addresses all older products - NIS07, N360v1, NIS08 - that were suffering this performance issue. As mentioned in my previous message, if you were already running NIS08.5, N360v2, or NIS09 then your product never had this issue with these types of iframes.
Thanks,
Matt Powers
Symantec Corp.
Message Edited by MJP on 12-21-2008 05:54 PM
Message Edited by MJP on 12-21-2008 05:57 PM
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That’s excellent, thank you. We have tested it in NIS2007 (after live update), and our website menus load properly again in IE7 (with our workaround code removed, i.e. back to our original code). Phew! Also works fine in NIS 2009. Thanks for fixing the bug and letting us know via the forum, Matt. Seasons greetings all!
I amnot sure if it is phishing filter or something else. In both IE 7 and Firefox when I submit a form the response is very slow. I am using 360 v. 2.5. I have posted this here but not received any response.
One example is a website where I need to upload my resume. It goes and never comes back.
Happens on multiple machines in my network.
I have turned off Firefox Privacy option as suggested on Firefox sites, but to no avail. I have also set IE and Firefox to Allow in Firewall Program Settings. Nothing seems to do anything at all.
Does Symantec at all care for customers? Understand that many of us use products in one office and then decide whether to recommend elsewhere.
Do you people test anything at all before releasing? Or just throw it out the window and let customers do the testing.
Utterly frustrated.
I've found a (partial) fix for the slowdown. This works in Vista anyway. As Ipv6 does not seem to be implemented yet, with everything on the internet, I disabled ipv6 on my machine. This seems to boost performance, and web page access speeds.
Someone may have posted this before, but it's Christmas evening, and I'm too lazy to look.. :)
Have a good one everyone.
robwhitener wrote:
[ ... ] As Ipv6 does not seem to be implemented yet, with everything on the internet, I disabled ipv6 on my machine. [ ... ]
You can say that again!
<< In December 2008, despite celebrating its 10-year anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general world-wide deployment. Recent studies indicate that penetration is still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. The leaders are Russia (0.76%), France (0.65%), Ukraine (0.64%), Norway (0.49%), and the United States (0.45%). >> [Wikipedia]
I have no idea why, but knocking ipv6 out seems to have helped speed issues with 360 and IE7 greatly.
I actually read about that through another newsgroup elsewhere. The mentality was, "why use something nobody else is using?". Maybe 360 is looking down the empty ipv6 pipe for threats while looking down the normal pipe, and that's sort of holding things up.
Might not work for everybody, but it certainly helped my 'puter.
Toshiba 355D-S7825
3gb RAM/250gb hd
I am using XP Pro SP3. I have disabled it in Firewall in Norton 360. Not sure how to disable it in XP though.
This though has not made any difference to the behavior.
Thanks much.
Message Edited by omsoft on 12-26-2008 09:02 AM
Thanks for acknowledging (partially) the problem.
I am running IE7 or Firefox 3.0.4 or Google Chrome 1.0 with XP Pro SP3.
This problem occurs on all three browsers. I have set Norton 360 v. 2.5.0.5 Firewall to allow for MSFT Generic Host Processing, IE, Firefox and Chrome. That did not change anything. I have tried to turn off phishing filter. No change. Disabled IPv6 in Firewall. No change.
One web site where I see the problem (for example) is www.careerbuilder.com. I tried to upload Word version of my resume and it has been now gone for over 5 minutes. Normal websites which I go to daily such as My Yahoo, My Google, NYTimes, etc. do not show any problem except at times they are slow. The problem is only visible when I upload a file. I have noticed the same problem at other web sites but those are non-job sites so it is not prudent to give you the info.
I am not ready to upgrade to another Norton product unless there is a guarantee that it will work and the upgrade is free.
If you need any further info, please reply and I will be more than happy to help.
Regards.
Still no solution, but I do have some extra data:
Upgrading to Norton 360 V2 or NIS2009 seems to solve the problem. This also explains why I didn't have any problems when I tested this with Norton 360 as I downloaded the trial yesterday.
As we have a high traffic website (160+ million pageviews/day), this unfortunately is not acceptable solution we can propose to all our users.
Any other ideas of what is causing this?
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