Microsoft's Windows Defender ranks seventh outside 15 antivirus (AV) products using an independent test. But the results don't tell an entire picture, argues Microsoft.

With improvements to Windows 10's built-in Windows Defender antivirus, quite a few users are questioning when it's worth obtaining a third-party product on the likes of Symantec, McAfee or Kaspersky.

But good latest latest results for Windows home and business use from German AV benchmarking firm, AV-Test, Windows Defender remains to be trailing third-party AV, tying in seventh place with four other vendors.

The upper AV products for Windows 10 across protection, performance, and usability in December were Trend Micro, Vipre, AhnLab, Avira, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and McAfee, determined by AV-Test.

Windows Defender rated highly on protection, detecting Entirely of new and old malware, but lost points for performance, which measures how much cash an AV slows applications and websites; and usability, which counts false-positives or instances where AV wrongly identifies a file as malicious.

Windows Defender's performance rating was dragged down given it slowed setting up frequently used applications throughout the industry average, and wrongly detected 16 papers legitimate software unlike the industry average of four.

But Microsoft wants enterprise people to know that Windows Defender can only be half the graphic, given the selection for customers to also deploy Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection's (ATP) "stack components" including Smartscreen, Application Guard, and Application Control.

Inside of the January and February test Windows Defender also scored A hundred percent on protection. However it did miss two samples. Photos it's retrained its machine-learning classifiers to detect them.

But Microsoft notes in a new paper that Defender ATP did catch them, that isn't reflected in AV-Test's or any other testing firms' results. Microsoft wishes to change this making sure that testers include so-called stack components for ATP.

"As threats be sophisticated, Microsoft in addition to other security platform vendors continue evolving their product capabilities to detect threats across different attack stages," Microsoft's Windows Defender Research team writes.

"We wish to escape see independent testers evolve their methodologies likewise. Our customers need greater transparency and optics into how much of an end-to-end solution can accomplish with regards to total preventive protection, just as quality of human components like antivirus.

"Microsoft is very engaged in working on several independent testers to evolve security testing to end-to-end security stack testing."

Windows Defender continues to have problems with incorrectly classifying legitimate apps as malware, as per the January-February test.

However, Microsoft contends that each one of six of an misclassified apps were either media players or audio mixers, which aren't common in enterprise environments.

Additionally, it argues of the fact that false-positives in the synthetic test don't add to the equation contextual information Microsoft uses at the real-world machines that prevent Defender from wrongly flagging clean apps as bad.

And Windows Defender may be significantly slower as opposed to the industry average for installing regularly employed applications. However, again Microsoft counters that enterprise users generally cut back time installing newly discovered apps and more time using browsers, email, and word processors.