Sub-optimum, because, Red is internationally recognized as signifying a Danger condition, especially bright blood red; thus, Red is inappropriate to signify normal function, although it is also closely identified with the COMODO IS logo, and the CIS logo is an attractive one.
Please select a neutral color for the icon in normal operation, and change it to Red when it recognizes a malware incursion or a malfunction of CIS (a malfunction might have been induced by malware), etc.
Maybe another negative hue, e.g., BLACK, could be used to indicate when the user makes a setting change (Learning mode, etc.) that disables a major protection.
Neutral colors for normal operation might be, pale green or pale blue or pale aqua, or a good shade of Brown, tan, beige, even mauve, etc.
Compliments to the COMODO gods for the product; these are relatively minor tweaks.
This issue has come up several times already, and I hope that someone from Comodo can confirm that it is being taken care of.
Let me give you an example of why this is important…
Last night I disconnected my PC from the internet and closed down CIS and other programs so that I could run a really thorough defrag without interference and then followed by resizing partitions. I finished what I had to do, turned off the PC and went to bed. This morning I switched it on and completely forgot that I had disabled CIS last night.
I then went browsing for 30 minutes before I noticed that the Win 7 flag was showing a caution. CIS tray icon showed nothing unusual.
This is clearly a bad situation. OK I should not have forgotten, but I am currently working across several PCs and so it is certainly possible to forget. Critically, and this win 7 issue has been reported many times across the internet, the Win 7 security flag is wholly inadequate. It is white and if an error then a small red cross appears on it. It is certainly not as clear as XP.
CIS 5 icon really should not sit there unchanged. The only thing it shows is up and down arrows for traffic - useful but not as critical as one of the defenses turned off.
As as suggestion, there could be a manually configured setting that baseline’s the security setting. For example, by default everything including sandbox would be assumed to be on and if any component is off then the icon would flash red. The icon could be normally blue as it used to be. If however an experienced user does not want to use the sandbox at all, then he/she should be able to re-baseline the icon so that it is not continually flashing red when the sandbox is off, but stays blue because that is the users chosen baseline. If then the antivirus is left off, then the icon would flah red, in this example.
Really hope that this can be implemented soon. Thanks.
Unlike a traffic light in which the lighted indicators position is easily memorized, a color changing status bar icon could be problematic for color blind individuals.
HeffeD’s comment is pertinent, and highlights the need for an icon shape mod as well as color. Let’s go for a black ? [questionmark] superimposed on the Yellow icon, and a black X across the red icon, for those colorblind persons. Workable, I think!