BiniSoft Windows Firewall Control

To switch between filter profiles, you now have to enable “elevation” every time, which essentially grants the app administrative privileges. Personally, this new feature annoys me (2-3 extra click's), but overall it's a great app.

I used TinyWall, FAB, Comodo Firewall, Simplewall, Fort firewall in the past. Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Control has all the needed features of others plus easy controls and self-evident logic. It shows notifications unlike FAB and some others, so I can easily find out what program is connecting to the Internet. Sometimes it was hard to find that out, even impossible.

Very lightweight firewall with no impact on PC performance, simple notifications and easy view of all apps allowed to access the Internet

While the general interface is an obvious upgrade to the awful MMC hellscape provided by Microsoft for Windows Firewall administration, it's still somewhat lacking. The problem is that WFC doesn't give you access to all the important aspects of individual firewall rules.

For example, it doesn't let you see or edit edge traversal settings in the rules editor dialog. In that case, it gives you a warning before you open the dialog, and that's it. It also doesn't let you edit ICMP types in the rules editor dialog. And so on.

The only place to view these things is in columns which are not displayed by default. And while you can view these important aspects of firewall rule configuration there, you can't edit them at all using WFC.

Also, the version of WFC I'm running REVERSES the source and destination address/port for incoming connections. This pushed my sanity to its limits until I realized what was going on.

The connections log is the biggest improvement offered by WFC, as trying to review blocked connections using the MMC interface inherent to Windows is pure torment.

You've probably heard of malwareBytes for their malware scans. I like their Firewalling program BiniSoft/Malwarebytes even more! I've tried many firewalls, and for simplicity and compatibility, I keep coming back to this software. It plays nice with my Glasswire, and gives good clear displays of your recent connections that have been accepted and/or blocked.

In previous versions of Windows, there was either no native firewall supplied with the OS or what was provided was extremely buggy, insecure, and intrusive. As of Windows 7, the OS provided firewall was upgraded to be robust and secure but was extremely difficult to configure and manage.

Unlike previous versions, the native firewall in Windows is now actually secure and lightweight. But using it is so difficult for many people that it's actually easier to install a different firewall to replace it than it is to get the native one to work. That's is a shame, because that native firewall is very tightly coupled with the operating system, and is actually very good.

WFC is not a firewall itself. What WFC does is to provide a wrapper around the existing firewall functionality already built into Windows and provides a sane, usable, and much more intuitive interface to the native firewall. The benefit of this approach is that there are no compatibility issues and there are no performance issues.

A properly configured firewall should be secure, but something you don't think about, and don't notice unless there's an issue. With WFC, the native firewall in Windows finally reaches this level.