Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner

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

~ the obituary ~

Microsoft announced Windows Live on 1 November 2005 and the Safety Center went into beta alongside it, carrying the internal codename Vegas. The premise was that you would not install an antivirus product at all. You would open a web page, let it look at the machine you happened to be sitting at, and close the tab.

It did more than hunt viruses. A full service scan went after junk files and open network ports as well, with a quick scan for people who did not want to wait. The whole thing ran on Internet Explorer 6, or on MSN Explorer if that was what the machine had.

Version 1.2.969 shipped on 14 August 2006 and that was effectively the last meaningful update. When Internet Explorer 7 arrived the product feedback forum filled up with script errors, most of them registry-related, and the team worked through them one at a time.

~ the case file ~

~ outliving its own name ~

On 18 November 2008 Microsoft announced it was discontinuing Windows Live OneCare, the paid subscription suite, and would give away an anti-malware product instead. That became Microsoft Security Essentials, which arrived in the second half of 2009.

The Safety Scanner wore the OneCare name and was left out of that decision. It kept running. For two and a half years after Microsoft shut down the product it was named after, the free scanner at onecare.live.com was still answering.

~ 15 april 2011 ~

Microsoft retired it on 15 April 2011 and Microsoft Safety Scanner took over the week it went. The new one is an executable you download, which expires ten days later, instead of a page you visit. The browser had stopped being somewhere you ran a system utility.

~ scanning somebody else's machine ~

This was a useful category in Turkey in those years, and not because anyone was fond of it. Home machines ran Windows XP on a TTNet line, and licensed antivirus cost money that people would rather put into the connection itself. Internet cafe machines were a shared surface nobody owned and nobody could install anything on.

A scanner you could reach from a browser fit that gap exactly. The catch was the one every web-based scanner of its generation had, and the Wikipedia article is blunt about it: the thing only looked when you asked it to, and did nothing whatsoever for the rest of the week.

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