How do AV banking and payment protection features work?

[the_tortoise]

Like the separate browsers offered in security suites.

Assuming they actually are more secure, how and why? What do they actually do that makes online financial transactions any more secure than they would be in a normal web browser?

 

[Judge]

I presume you mean browser plug-ins like ESET and that which other security product vendors offer. I'd think such questions are best answered by directly approaching individual vendors' claims rather than polling this audience.

Googling things like "ESET", or "ESET NOD32". And reviewing links like this:

Banking & Payment protection | ESET Internet Security | ESET Online help

 

[the_tortoise]

Only one I found that gave any description of how it works was Avast (I think) which states that it starts a separate desktop session for the browser, and prevents inter-application communications with the browser during that session.

Not sure if it's safe to assume they all work similarly or not.

I don't like mainstream "user-friendliness"....which often seems to amount to "Click on [x] and trust that it's a good thing to do because we said so, you don't need to know how anything works; Let us do all your thinking for you [except really it's not an offer where you have a choice because the information about how things work is not offered, or is extremely difficult to find]."

 

[Judge]

Not sure if it's safe to assume they all work similarly or not.

Totally agree with this. Given the proprietary nature of such things, short of reverse engineering there's likely no way to determine this.

After all, no one is going to admit to reverse-engineering anything not theirs. Even if they did.

Apart from how effective such plug-ins may or may not be, is how they may or may not impact the performance of various browsers. A proprietary browser might offer better security integrated from within, but what is lost in terms of just a web browser?