Ad-Aware / Lavasoft

» see adaware.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ad-Aware was on every Windows machine I was asked to fix between roughly 2003 and 2007. It was never something anyone chose. It was what you ran after somebody had installed a download manager and come away with four toolbars and a home page they could not change back.

Lavasoft was started in Germany in 1999 by Nicolas Stark and Ann-Christine Åkerlund, and moved to Gothenburg in 2002. The product did one thing: it scanned for software installed on your machine to watch you rather than to break it. Antivirus vendors of the period did not really regard that as their problem. A program that logged your browsing and shipped it somewhere was not a virus under any definition they were working with, so for several years there was a gap, and Ad-Aware sat in the middle of it.

The name was literal. It found adware. In 2002 that meant Gator and Comet Cursor and the rest of the browser-hijacking economy, which arrived bundled inside things people actually wanted, usually a file-sharing client or a free download accelerator. You ran the scan, it gave you a list, you deleted the list and the machine got faster. For a lot of people that was the first time a computer had visibly been repaired by something they did themselves.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually cleaning ~

The spyware of that era was not criminal in the way the word now suggests. Most of it belonged to advertising companies with legal departments, and the payload was a changed home page and a data feed going back to a server. It was installed with consent, in the sense that consent was on page four of an installer nobody read.

That is why antivirus would not touch it. There was a signed agreement. Ad-Aware's contribution was deciding the agreement did not matter and the user's actual intention did, which sounds obvious now and was the subject of several years of legal threats then.

~ the reference scanner ~

By July 2013 the free version had been downloaded 450 million times, more than 387 million of those from Download.com alone. Very little consumer software has ever moved at that scale, and almost none of it for nothing.

The pairing was standard. Ad-Aware for the adware, Spybot for whatever it missed, and you ran both because neither caught everything. In Turkey it arrived the way most software did, off a download site or a burned CD passed around, and it was the one piece of maintenance software a non-technical person could be taught to run without supervision.

~ the turn ~

In 2011 Lavasoft was bought by the Solaria Fund, a vehicle for two Montreal businessmen, and the headquarters went to Canada. What followed is documented and not seriously disputed: bundled extras in the installer, and browser settings changed without a clear ask. The company that had built its name removing exactly this from other people's machines started shipping a lighter version of it.

By January 2015 it held under one percent of the antivirus market. In 2018 Lavasoft renamed itself Adaware, after its own product, which is generally what a company does when the product is the last asset it has.

~ how it ended ~

Avanquest, part of the French group Claranova, ended up holding it. The last real release was June 2018. On 1 October 2023 the anti-malware engine stopped being sold or renewed for Windows, with support running out in August 2024, and the company's own help pages now state that the antivirus and every version before it are discontinued, with no downloads and no definition updates. What still carries the Adaware name is a browsing privacy product that shares a wordmark with the thing people remember.

The category went first anyway. Windows started shipping a defender that was on by default, and browsers stopped letting an arbitrary installer rewrite your home page. The money in advertising moved off your machine and onto exchanges, where it never needed to be installed on anything at all. Ad-Aware won its argument and then had nothing left to scan.

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