the boss checked my computer history and saw AF

[Aractus]

You repeatedly said "it blocks malware", which is not what it does. It blocks requests to sites which are known to distribute malware, and also ad networks. There's a big and important difference there. I'm just making sure people don't take what you say literally because uBlock, whilst awesome, is not the only thing you should have to protect your computer, as you also stated.

Yes, uBlock blocks URL requests. Antivirus programs block already downloaded malware from actually executing. They're both blocking mechanisms but work in different ways, which is why they're complimentary to each other. It's also why the MVPS Hosts file is complimentary to both also - since if uBlock gets disabled, you still have a system-level filter in place blocking DNS requests made to known unsafe domains.

There are still other security measures people can and should take. Shared passwords across sites for example - at the very least you should have strong unique passwords for banking websites (including PayPal), for your email address, for ebay and other webstores you use. Additionally you should secure your home router login with a strong password as well (not to mention wifi), and ensure remote access is disabled (TR-069). Especially if you have VoIP.

And finally, you should not store your credit card number on web-merchants. Either use PayPal for subscriptions, or pay manually by entering the amount each time. Even I'm guilty of having my C/C number stored on Amazon, but I would not consider doing that on most other websites.

And again, many people don't bother securing this stuff, many are not aware of the dangers of not doing so. Many people think that just by installing an anti-virus software it protects them, whereas there are a number of cyber-attacks that don't involve the use of malware or viruses that they could still be vulnerable to (phishing, identity theft, etc).

In fact I don't even mind admitting this - once, many years ago now, one PayPal phishing email fooled me - I entered my username and password. Did it matter? Of course not - I figured it out right away as soon as I looked at the address bar, loggged into the real PayPal and then I changed my password. Since it has a unique password, the password I gave the phishers was usless for any other purpose. Now - this is actually a serious flaw of the PayPal design. When you go to sign up for a website or make an online payment it automatically redirects you to their website. The problem with this is that I could clone any popular merchant site - let's say Amazon - or create a fake one, and then have it re-direct to a fake PayPal sign-in page and everyone would think it's legit unless they look at the address bar, and enter their information. What should happen is that you are redirected to a page that instructs you to manually type in https://paypal.com  to continue. The way that it currently works makes it much more difficult for people to identify a phishing site.

I would not recommend Avast anymore. The reason it comes with bundle-ware is likely because they use CNET, which is known to bundle software into downloads. Honestly, when it comes to free anti-virus these days, you get what you pay for. I would recommend using Kaspersky.
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AVAST routinely gets ranked behind several paid anti-virus products these days, and it's honestly not worth it anymore. For a small yearly price, you can get a decent anti-virus which also performs heuristic based detection.

Oh yeah, that'll go down real well with people that aren't even using free antivirus software to begin with! You need realistic expectations of what people are willing to do. Even I wouldn't pay 50 bucks for anti-virus at home. Sure, it might be worth that money - but the gap between Avast and it is not worth $50. Especially biennially -WTF? Anything could happing in the next two years to make another paid antivirus program better value, and giving people a two year contract essentially locks them in and will stop them thinking about competition! Yes it might be good business sense, but it's not good for security. But, as you know, I take numerous other security measures as it is. Yes you might put it higher on your hierarchy of protection, but, for people who want something for free I still think Avast! is best, once you know how to cope with the crap it comes bundled with. If it didn't have "game mode", and it kept popping up ads, then I'd uninstall it and look for another free program.

I'm really not sure why you brought up Apple here (FYI, I use anti-virus on my Mac).

I was talking about Linux / UNIX security, not Apple. Ask any hacker, they will tell you that Windows security is shit. It's nothing to do with the fact it's the most used system, it has everything to do with the underlying system design, the fact that by trying to make everything backwards compatible they shot themselves in the foot, and the fact that security was literally an afterthought when it came to Windows, which is why they've been trying to catch up for years.

With UNIX, they kept it simple, and it worked.

My point was that system security needs to be considered in context. Apple hardware is total shit, and so is android hardware. You brought up servers earlier, and as you would know, windows is used as well as linux for servers. Most of the internet users linux servers because they've historically run faster. Go back 15 years, and system performance was one of the most important factors in selecting server operating systems (especially so for shared servers). But with that said, windows provided certain features that some web developers wanted - so there has always been demand for both.