Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2015 review

Trend Micro has totally overhauled the user interface for Titanium Internet Security. This sounds like good news because we weren’t overly enamoured with its design in 2012 or 2013, but somehow it’s even worse now than it was back then. On the surface the interface looks clean, but sadly Trend Micro has added theatrical animations to every button press. Whenever you click on anything, you’ll have to wait a couple of seconds while you watch the icons slide and bobble around the window.

Read our comprehensive guide to Internet Security 2015

In the middle of the home screen, there’s a big button, which runs a quick scan when you click it. Above it there are four very vague tabs, which divide the software into Device, Privacy, Data and Family. Device shows scanning and PC health tools and promotes its mobile security package. Privacy offers very much in-fashion social networking protection, including link scanning and a tool to let you know whether your privacy settings are too lax.

^ Trend Micro’s interface looks clean, but as soon as you click any buttons, a multitude of annoying animations begin to play

There’s also a tool that allows you to stop yourself or your children from sharing personal information such as phone numbers and credit card information. Adding a few digits of your phone number, card or a few letters of your address to its filters will stop any information containing those characters being sent across internet. It works, although it’s easy to circumvent by adding spaces or changing letters to uppercase, so we’re dubious about how well this will work in the real world.

The Data tab has a secure deletion tool and a password manager, although the latter is an extra costing £9.95 for a year.

Finally, the Family tab contains a button for parental controls, which let you completely lock down your PC so web pages containing various categories of offensive or child-unfriendly content such as porn and gambling. We turned all the settings on and our internet browsing experience was certainly a more morally palatable.

The Settings menu is almost comically obtuse – there are three tabs to select from, then a fourth button at the bottom left of the window for “Other settings” which could easily have been put in the main settings menu.

^ Deleting a single browser cookie is all it took to get a big smiley face from Trend Micro Titanium

A misjudged user interface can be forgiven if protection scores are good, but in this exceptionally competitive round of testing, Trend Micro Titanium was just slightly behind the top-scoring efforts from Norton, Kaspersky and Avast. The software was able to fully defend against 94 of the 100 simulated threats and neutralised a further two after they had made a start on infecting the system. Slightly worrying were the four threats that bypassed the software completely, causing problems for our test machine.

Things weren’t much better when it came to flagging up legitimate software as harmful. On five occasions Trend Micro blocked a piece of software during its installation without giving the user a choice, something that we penalise AV packages for heavily. Trend Micro came ninth out of the ten home AV suites on test, only ahead of the 360Safe, the naggiest of them all.

We’d hoped that Trend Micro would be back on the upswing after poor performance in our last set of tests, but its user interface is somehow worse than before and its protection scores are just too low to recommend. Buy Norton Internet Security 2015 instead.