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Opera

2012-02-02T01:55:00.000-08:00

Opera

The bottom line: Extensions, highly competitive page-load times, cutting edge features, and strong support for "future Web" technologies make Opera 11 one of the best browsers available.

Review:
The second-oldest browser currently in use, Opera debuted way back in 1995 and has recently undergone a major overhaul. No longer the quirky choice of enthusiasts, Opera has developed into a robust, full-featured suite of browsing tools.

Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and simple integration with e-mail and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality round out the essentials.

What's new in Opera 11?

Installation
Installing Opera is a fast and short process, taking less than two minutes. Many of Opera's built-in features require creating a MyOpera account, but the browser will only prompt you to do so when you use them for the first time--it's not required to browse.

Tap the "Options" button on the first install screen to reveal configuration tweaks. Besides changing the browser's default language and install path, you can also install for just the currently-signed on user, or choose to install Opera directly to an external device. It's a great, simple way to create a portable version of Opera for a USB key.

Interface
Opera's interface keeps the same look that debuted in Opera 10.50, with a condensed menu button in the upper left corner, tabs on top, and a translucent status bar on the bottom that hosts buttons to reveal Opera's Panels, and to activate Link, Unite, and Turbo. The bottom right corner of the status bar sports a dedicated zoom button.

New features in first Opera 11 beta (screenshots)

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Buttons on the navigation bar have been condensed, and are now the same height as the location bar. This gives the interface a polished look, and minimizes the amount of space that the bar takes up. The search box, located in its default space to the right of the location bar, can be removed. That and further interface customizations can be made by right-clicking on the navigation bar and selecting customize.

Extension buttons appear to the right of the search box, as they do in Google Chrome, while a recycle bin for quickly re-opening recently closed tabs lives on the right side of the tab bar.

The influence of the radical interface changes that Google Chrome introduced in 2008 can be seen here, from the tabs on top to the extension icons, yet Opera's personality does still come through enough to have a different vibe and feel from Chrome.

Features and support
The five major browsers have been liberally borrowing features and innovations from each other for years, yet Opera has developed a reputation for showcasing some of the more interesting browser developments first.

Opera 11 introduces tab stacks, a tab grouping mechanism similar in concept to Firefox 4's Panorama, but completely based in the tab bar. To use it, drag one tab on top of another. The bottom tab will disappear, and an arrow will appear to the right of the tab. Click it to reveal the stack, and drag a tab off the stack to separate it. Where Panorama's global viewpoint makes it easy to see all your tab groups, Opera's tab stacking feels much smoother and more intuitive.

Tab stacks are a tab-grouping mechanism similar in concept to Firefox's Panorama, but completely based in the tab bar. To use it, drag one tab on top of another. The bottom tab will disappear, and an arrow will appear to the right of the tab. Click it and the tabs in the stack will slide out to one side. To break up a stack, drag a tab off the stack. Mouse over the stack to see previews for all the tabs in the stack.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

As noted earlier, extensions have finally come to Opera in version 11. Opera uses a lightweight extension framework based in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to minimize the processor hit that add-ons can incur. If you're familiar with the extension networks in the WebKit-based Chrome and Safari, you'll be very comfortable with how Opera handles its add-ons. It's interesting to note that Opera sees extensions as singing in harmony with their existing Widgets framework, saying that widgets are basically stand-alone Web-based applications, while extensions are for changing the user experience in-browser.

A third big change is the introduction of on-demand plug-ins. This is a feature that has been on the periphery of user awareness for a while, but it's about to go big as it provides much more control to users over page security and page load times. It's great for people who are rightly worried about unpatched Flash and QuickTime security exploits, or just want sites to load faster. Go to Preferences, Advanced, then Content to toggle it.

Another change comes to the security badge system, which marks sites as "verified safe". Click on the gray "Web" globe icon to the left of the URL bar to check a site's status. Getting information returned was quick on most sites, although it was a bit slow for others. The badges are colored yellow for "secure", green for "trusted", and blue for when you're running Opera's Turbo mode, another excellent feature that's designed for assisting people surfing on slower connections. The Turbo badge will also display estimated data savings. You can turn on Turbo using the button in the status bar at the bottom left of the browser.

Opera's site badges also include a useful reporting mechanism, so it's easy to report a site as fraudulent or malicious.

With plug-ins disabled, click the "play" triangle and the plug-in content--in this case, Flash video--will start playing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

There have been some smaller tweaks to the browser, too. Pinning a tab will now jump it to the left of the tab bar, as is done in other browsers. The personal bar has been replaced, too, by a bookmarks bar, both pulling the browser into parity with the competition and making bookmarks accessible with one click.

Opera's extras push it to among the top of the class. Opera's desktop widgets can appear anywhere, and Opera Unite and its deep feature set for file sharing and streaming is now available to Mac users. Quick Find has improved the search tool, allowing for full text searching from the address field, the history panel, and opera:historysearch. We're also fans of the inline spell checker that supports 51 languages, and the recent addition of the auto-updater. Unlike Chrome's automatic updates, Opera plays nice with its users and gives you several choices as to how to implement auto-updating, including disabling it.

There's Growl and multitouch trackpad support on Macs, support for some HTML5 including next-generation video and audio codec WebM, geolocation compatibility, Web Workers, App Cache, and Web fonts. The Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which Opera co-sponsored, hasn't yet been added, although Opera expects it will be soon. Meanwhile, Opera Link enables Bookmarks, the Personal bar, Speed Dial, and Notes synchronization across all other Opera instances, including the iPhone's Opera Mini. Opera's availability on multiple mobile and desktop platforms makes it uniquely appealing as a one-stop browser shop.

One of Opera's lesser-known features is its integrated mail client. It's a reasonable alternative to Outlook, offering many similar features. It can handle importing mailbox files from Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Netscape, and Eudora, supports POP3 and IMAP, and quickly synced with Gmail when we added our account.

There are other features in Opera, including tab previews, newsgroups support, a built-in session manager, and a fantastic array of customizations that rivals Firefox. Of all the browsers out there, Opera ships with a massive feature set and is an excellent choice for users who want something fast and robust right out of the box.

Performance
Opera some big performance improvements in this version, and they appear to bear out. In addition to helping some pages load up to 30 percent faster simple by toggling the plug-ins, as described in the features section above, the browser's performance in general has been improved. Opera says that Opera 11 is 15 to 20 percent faster than Opera 10.63, and that the browser size on disk has been reduced by almost one-third.

Full benchmarks will be added here as they are completed, but preliminary results indicate that Opera 11's page-load times remain comparable to Google Chrome's on publicly-available benchmark tests like Google's V8, WebKit's SunSpider 0.9.1, Mozilla's Kraken, and Futuremark's Peacekeeper.

Conclusion
Opera is in firm grip of the 5th-place slot in the race to be the world's most-used browser. It doesn't have the backing of a major corporation like Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and it lacks the massive developer's community of Mozilla's Firefox. What it does have, and these are recent developments to be sure, are a fantastic combination of speed and built-in services.

Opera undoubtedly has what it takes to unseat even the biggest-name browsers. You just need to hear it sing.

Java Runtime Environment

2012-02-02T00:54:00.000-08:00

Java Runtime Environment (JRE)

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) provides the libraries, the Java Virtual Machine, and other components to run applets and applications written in the Java programming language. In addition, two key deployment technologies are part of the JRE: Java Plug-in, which enables applets to run in popular browsers; and Java Web Start, which deploys standalone applications over a network. This is the official Java Download from Sun Microsystems.

Java Runtime Environment is in the Other Browser Add-ons & Plug-ins category of the Browsers section.

What's new in this version: Version 7 Update 2 added New JVM (Java HotSpot Virtual Machine, version 22) that improves reliability and performance, include support for Oracle Solaris 11, and Firefox 5 and later.

Internet Explorer

2012-02-02T00:49:00.000-08:00

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 8 addresses just about all of the major concerns that users and critics have had with the world's most used browser. Whether they get answered in a way you like is another matter.

There are several new and interesting features. Web Slices lets you save predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead of going to a traffic Web site for updates, the latest commuting news comes to you. Similarly, Accelerators make repetitive tasks one-click behaviors, for instance finding directions or blogging. InPrivate browsing introduces a cache and history on-off switch, while related tabs are color-coded and automatically reorganized as you open them. There's also tab sandboxing, which means that when a tab crashes, IE itself won't, and it even tries to resurrect the page that crashed.

There's a greater emphasis on Web standards and security than before. The SmartScreen and cross-site scripting filters throw up a red warning page when you're about to visit an unsafe site. There's also domain highlighting, which grays out the name of the URL you're looking at except for the domain itself. This sounds simple, but effectively draws attention to spoofed site URLs. There's also a compatibility button so that sites designed specifically for IE 7 and earlier can still be viewed.

IE 8 lacks a default "smart" location bar that many other browsers have, but you can search your history and most visited pages from there. Also, the installation process still requires a reboot--unimpressive, to say the least. Drawbacks aside, there's no reason to not upgrade if you're an old fan of IE, and there's even a few things in IE 8 for new users.

Mozilla Firefox

2012-02-02T00:40:00.000-08:00

Mozilla Firefox

The bottom line: Firefox 10 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of Firefox's competition, too.

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 10, as is this Firefox How To collection, even though it features Firefox 4.

Firefox reborn in version 4

Review:
For those of you who spent 2011 away from the Internet, it's the year that Firefox went from annual major-point updates to a Chrome-style quick-release cycle. How quick? A new major version number along with a spate of performance and feature improvements lands in the Firefox stable version every six weeks. So, Firefox is on version 10 at the time of this review. As a point of comparison, Chrome is currently on version 16 even though it only launched in 2008.

To put it bluntly: Firefox has benefited from the rapid-release cycle. Both fixes and features get out to users faster than before, which puts a safer, sleeker browser in your hands with fewer delays. A vocal, minuscule minority has pooh-poohed the increase in version numbers, but that's hardly a legitimate complaint in a world where mobile apps update silently and effectively.

These major changes first landed in Firefox 4, released in March 2011, so we're going to be referencing it a fair bit. The browser that you can download now is in the same speed category as its competition; offers many similar features (stronger in some areas and slightly weaker in others); includes broad, cross-platform support for hardware acceleration and other "future-Web" tech and standards; and is a must-have for Android users (download for Android).

Where Firefox 9 focused more on performance, with Mozilla claiming 30 percent faster page-rendering times on sites with heavy JavaScript, Firefox 10 brings feature work to the fore. This means new and improved developer tools, and a big change to add-ons. The vast majority of your plucky little extensions will no longer freak out when Firefox updates. That made sense as a safety protocol when the browser updated once a year, but now that it updates eight times that often, it became a usability hazard. See the Features and Performance sections below for more details.

It's important to point out that there are four versions of Firefox available at the moment, and this review only addresses the stable branch, intended for general use. Firefox's other channels--Firefox beta (download for Windows | Mac | Linux); Firefox Aurora, analogous to Google Chrome's dev channel (download Aurora for Windows | Mac | Linux); and the bleeding-edge, updated-nightly Firefox Minefield (download for all versions)--are respectively progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.

Installation
Installing Firefox 10 was a fine, quick experience. Keep in mind that Firefox now has four "channels," so if you've been on the beta channel since the days of version 3.6, you will stay on it until you download the installer for a different channel. There's no in-channel way to switch channels. If you're updating from version 3.6 to version 10, the process is likely to take several minutes because of the significant code changes.

Firefox uses automatic updates, although Windows users will still see the User Account Control box appear.

Careful Firefox observers will notice that the browser no longer ships with a separate icon for Safe Mode. Simply hold down Shift; when you click on the Firefox icon to open a box, you will be allowed to customize which settings carry over to Safe Mode.

Firefox automatically installs a Windows 7 Taskbar icon if you choose it as your default browser. Uninstalling the browser does not leave behind any icons or folders if you choose to remove your settings at the same time.

A new feature checks your add-ons to see which ones you installed and which ones come from third-party vendors, such as security suite makers. The browser will now ask you if you'd like to disable any of these third-party add-ons when you upgrade to at least version 8. On top of that, all future third-party add-ons will be blocked from autoinstalling. Instead, you'll be presented with the option to allow them or block them on a per-case basis. This puts Firefox squarely on the side of the user.

Interface
If you're a big Firefox fan, you'd better hope that you weren't very attached to 2010's version 3.6 look. Falling in love with the new design won't hurt you, either. The main interface is now completely different from what's come before, retaining only the larger back button that debuted in version 3. Not surprisingly, the new design also brings the browser significantly closer to the minimalist style first adopted by Google Chrome in 2008, although it actually looks most similar to Opera 11.

The menu bar has been squished into an orange button on the upper left, with menu options spread across two columns. Nearly all the submenus have been redesigned as well, although the hot keys remain the same, so the learning curve isn't particularly long. In fact, the menu redesign makes it much easier to get to bookmarks, add-ons, and history, as they now all live on one Menu pane. The Menu button is not available to Mac users, to keep with the Mac OS X theme.

In addition to the major changes to the menu, smaller changes have greatly improved usability. For example, there's now a Get Bookmark Add-ons link in the Bookmarks submenu. The History submenu now has Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows sections.

Tabs are now on top by default, and while the forward and back navigation buttons haven't moved, the stop and refresh buttons are now attached to the right side of the location bar, next to the bookmark star. When you're typing a URL, the "Go" button appears at the end of the location bar as an arrow. While resolving a URL, the box changes from the "Go" arrow to an "X" for the new Stop button. It might be hard for some to see since the traditional stop-and-go colors of red and green have been removed. You can customize the Firefox skin with the restartless Personas add-ons.

Right of the location bar lives the traditional search box, with its drop-down list of search engines. Above that on the tab bar there is a new button that lists all your open tabs, and you can add a button to access the Panorama tab-grouping feature. If you don't see the button, you can add it by right-clicking on the interface and choosing Customize, then dragging and dropping the Tab Groups icon next to the List All Tabs button. We don't consider many customizations to be essential, but this one is.

The Status bar that lives at the bottom of the interface is now hidden by default, again in keeping with the minimalist philosophy and the competition. There's a new Add-on bar as well, also hidden by default, to which extension icons can be added if you want to keep add-on icons easily available but out of the way of the main interface.

One of Firefox's singular strengths is its capacity for customization, which remains unparalleled and which is accessible even to novice users. While competing browsers do offer add-ons and extensions, Firefox remains far ahead of all of them in interface customization. And so, if you don't like the new interface, it's quite easy to revert it to an older style--or just about any other look--using add-ons and themes.

Features and support
Firefox's features are robust and generally competitive. There is some minor functionality missing in a few cases where the browser remains behind the competition, but Firefox is generally one of the most progressive major browsers available, an early adopter if not always an innovator.

The most important feature in the modern Firefox is Sync. As with many recent Firefox features, it started off as a rough add-on, and often deleted data. If you were scared off by its early bad behavior, you'll be glad to know that Mozilla has worked out its birthing pains. Sync now smoothly syncs your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs, not only with other computers, but also with your Android version of Firefox.

To use it, click on the Menu button and choose Set Up Sync from the left column. That will take you to a window where you can connect an existing Firefox Sync account or create a new one. Within Firefox Sync, there are two important security points. One is that Firefox encrypts your data before sending it over an encrypted connection to its servers, where it remains encrypted. Mozilla says that the company would not be able to access it even if somebody there wanted to. The second is that you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an age when private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with shocking regularity, setting up a personal sync server is one way to ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own data.

Another big new feature in 2011 has been support for restartless add-ons. These add-ons are written differently from standard Firefox add-ons, and are expected to become the format for add-ons in the future. As such, relatively speaking, not many restartless add-ons exist--about 776 at the time of this review, compared with the thousands of "standard" add-ons. However, this is an improvement of more than 600 add-ons since Firefox 4 debuted in March 2011.

Add-ons continue to pose a big problem for Mozilla, as older add-ons become a bottleneck for Firefox that other browsers, with their newer add-on frameworks, don't have to manage. The Add-on SDK is designed to confront this problem directly. However, more than 80 percent of add-ons available will cease to have compatibility problems with Firefox when the problem was nothing more than the "maximum version number compatibility," the aforementioned security feature.

Firefox's add-on manager has been completely overhauled. There's a lot of useful new technology here, as compared with the version 3.6 manager. Not only can you search for add-ons from within the add-on window using the search box in the upper-right corner, you can add them without having to jump to the external Mozilla Add-on Web site, also known as AMO. The manager calls out the AMO add-on collections, which you can create more explicitly in the Get Add-ons tab. The add-on manager also allows you to browse Personas. It's slightly annoying that clicking on an add-on group or collection opens the page in a new browser window, whereas clicking on a specific add-on opens that add-on's download page within the add-on manager. That's a very minor criticism, though.

Other changes to the add-on manager include forward and back buttons specific to the manager, in the upper-left corner, and left-side navigation tabs specifically focusing on Extensions, Appearance, and Plug-ins. Meanwhile, two little improvements to the manager will impress keyboard junkies. There's a new hot key for pulling up the add-on manager, Control-Shift-A, and you can type "about:addons" directly into the location bar to access the add-ons manager in a tab. And of course, there's the third-party add-on guard as mentioned above.

More changes include Twitter as an option for Firefox's built-in search box, setting the browser to initially reload only the active tab after a crash, and an update to dragging tabs that makes it easier to identify them with simple animations.

The tab-grouping feature called Panorama presents your tabs as an array of thumbnail images. The thumbnails reside in rectangular boxes that constitute a group. Tabs can be dragged from one group to another, and groups can be named and moved as well. You can add a tab to an existing group or create a new group by right-clicking on the tab and choosing Move to Group. The hot-key combo Control-Shift-E will also jump between the main interface and the Tab Group window.

The overall idea is to make it easier to switch from one tab to another, to group or regroup related tabs, and to get a global view of what's going on with your tabs. It's potentially a big improvement in browser usage, compared with aiming a mouse at an ever-skinnier tab, cycling through a list with Alt-Tab keystrokes, or pecking at a drop-down menu to reach the tabs that overflowed off into the deep. Firefox 6 changed how Panorama interacted with the browser's memory management, so that tabs now load at launch only for the active group.

The Bookmarks and History menus have been redesigned, and now the hot keys open them by default as sidebars. Go through the Menu button to get the full menus. We were actually quite impressed with the layout of the menu button options for Bookmarks and History, finding it much more useful, with quick access to recently closed tabs and new bookmark tags. This is probably the most useful in-browser bookmark manager around, especially if you enable Sync and use it with your Android phone or tablet.

Another relatively new feature is App Tabs, which reduces the width of a tab to its favicon and pins the tab permanently on the left. The tab will glow when updated, a useful indicator for things like Web mail. And when you start typing into the location bar, one of the search choices will be related open tabs so that you can quickly switch to an existing tab.

Under the hood, Firefox is an much different critter. The biggest change is full hardware acceleration across all platforms, which means that Firefox draws on your graphics card to speed up complex rendering. You'll see dramatic HTML5 support, including for high-definition WebM video, and broad support for the HTML5 canvas, video, audio, geolocation, drag and drop, and form tags. OpenType fonts are supported, as are CSS3 and newer JavaScript values. WebGL and hardware acceleration give the browser a massive boost, which we'll discuss in the Performance section below.

The short version of all this is that Firefox is on the cutting edge of the next generation of Web standards, and that benefits you immensely by offering faster rendering times of Web sites that can do more.

A new Web Developer menu collates tools for building and debugging Web sites in one location. One such is the ScratchPad tool, which browsers like Opera and Chrome have had for some time. It allows developers to test JavaScript and CSS before implementing it. The Web console feature also has a new autocomplete option and can have its location customized.

There's a decent list of other, smaller changes to Firefox that are worth pointing out because they'll enhance your work flow in one way or another. One of these is Switch to Tab. Open a new tab and start typing the name of an already-open tab, and the URL will appear in the drop-down with "Switch to Tab" beneath it. Select that one, and the new tab closes and you're whisked to the pre-existing tab. It's a great trick for cutting down on the amount of time it takes to sift through 45 open tabs, and removes the chance of accidentally having the same tab open twice or more.

The location bar--or as Mozilla calls it, the Awesome Bar--retains familiar features, such as the options to search your history and bookmarks and to tap your default search engine to provide you with quick results. However, the "feeling lucky" instant jump to what the browser thinks is the Web site you're most likely to be looking for has been disabled because of internal Mozilla concerns about inadvertently sending personal information to the search provider.

The Do Not Track feature indicates via a header notification that you want to opt out of targeted advertisements. However, it requires that the Web site you're viewing, and therefore that site's developers, respect the header itself. While this is great for future-proofing the Web, as implemented at the time of writing, not many Web sites have taken notice of it. That doesn't mean it won't eventually have a big impact, but that time is not now, and it's better to install an add-on like Adblock Plus to get more complete ad-tracking protection.

There are two smaller yet important changes to the way that Firefox protects you. One is the Content Security Policy, which is designed to block one of the most common types of browser threats, cross-site scripting attacks, by allowing sites to tell the browser which content is legitimate. Though CSP also places the burden on the sites' developers, it's backward-compatible and aimed mostly at well-known sites hosting immense volumes of data and content.

Another security improvement is the implementation of HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This prevents your log-in information from being intercepted by telling Firefox to automatically create a secure connection to a site's servers.

The "identity block," the colored left-most section of the URL, has been given a refresh to better call out the Web site you're on, and the URL bar itself now changes the text color of the URL you're on so that the domain is black, for easy identification, while the rest of the URL is gray. This is a small security change, and one that's been previously available to people who are comfortable changing their about:config, but it's definitely a strong visual cue that helps you avoid getting spoofed.

The new feature set alone makes it worth upgrading to the latest version of Firefox. While some older Firefox users may feel that these features add unnecessary bloat to a browser that offers add-ons specifically so that you can customize your browsing experience, Firefox 4 was actually dramatically faster than Firefox 3.6, and there have been significant speed gains ever since. We address the browser's behavior in the section below.

Performance
As mentioned earlier, Firefox 10's performance has been greatly improved by the addition of graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration. It allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing.

You ought to see the memory improvements in Firefox 10 when the browser is kept open for long periods of time, when multiple tabs are open at once, and when the browser is used concurrently with other programs that also use a lot of memory. The company also noted that its MemShrink initiative was successful in part because of the rapid release cycle that a vocal minority of Firefox users have been criticizing.

Installing Firefox 10 prompts you to opt in to a new anonymous reporting measure called Telemetry. Not unlike security suites, which use your data anonymously to improve threat detection rates, Mozilla plans to crowdsource its performance data to learn more about how the browser performs in real-world situations. Unlike the security suites, Telemetry is opt-in, so Mozilla won't be collecting data without permission. Not surprisingly given Mozilla's reputation for openness, Telemetry is far more open about what it collects and why than similar features from competitors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Currently, it looks at four categories: memory usage, CPU core count, cycle collection times, and startup speed. Curious readers can install the About:telemetry add-on to see the personal statistics that Firefox is gathering.

If you've enabled Telemetry and would like to disable it, you can go to Options, Advanced, and uncheck the Submit Performance Data box at the bottom of the General tab.

JavaScript plays a major role in the Web, and changes to the JaegerMonkey engine combined with the GPU acceleration give the browser some serious juice. Ongoing improvements in browser technology make regular browser testing a challenge, but March 2011's browser benchmark battle placed Firefox 4 ahead of Chrome 11 and Internet Explorer 9. It wouldn't be surprising to find that Chrome and Firefox currently test much closer to each other because of their regular updates.

One interesting publicly available benchmark is JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. JSGameBench hasn't posted new results since April 2011, but the ones it did post gave strong marks to the Firefox 4 beta both with and without WebGL. The stable version of Firefox 4 also did well in JSGameBench tests once it was released.

Note that to effectively use hardware acceleration, you must make sure that your graphics card drivers are up-to-date.

Browser benchmarks are a notoriously fidgety lot, and often come up against legitimate complaints that they look at too narrow a set of features--such as checking only JavaScript rendering times. In hands-on use, at least, Firefox 10 can more than hold its own. It's not clear that it's enough to counter the past three years of Chrome decisively winning the fastest-browser PR campaign, but that may no longer be the point. All five major browsers are now similarly fast at JavaScript tests, and you may want to start looking at other criteria to determine which browser is best for you.

In our experience, one of the most positive performance differences between Firefox 3.6 and the current version is that Firefox 10 crashes far, far less. That's due in no small part to improvements made to the plug-in crash protection, which prevents plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight from dropping the browser dead. If one of them crashes, simply reload the page.

Conclusion
Definitely a worthy heir to the Firefox name, Firefox 10's one major drawback is that, like its competitors, it still uses massive amounts of RAM. Don't expect that to change as the browser is relied upon to perform more and more tasks that once occurred in other programs. However, it will be less of a problem as hardware improves and Mozilla continues to push initiatives like Telemetry and protection from third-party add-ons.

Firefox 10 faces a challenging and ever-advancing field of competition. Some people have probably abandoned Firefox because of the significant speed differences between version 3.6 and Google Chrome. Others might be turned off by Mozilla's open-armed embrace of the rapid-release cycle, and the diminishing importance of version numbers. Frankly, we find that a bit silly, as it's better to get newer features and fixes as soon as they're ready, instead of waiting for a once-yearly update. Competition has forced Mozilla and others to put out better browsers in order to thrive, and we think that Firefox 10 will keep the browser competitive.

Adobe Flash Player

2012-02-02T00:20:00.000-08:00

Adobe Flash Player

There should be no doubt that Apple's decision to block Flash from iOS in favor of HTML5 has spurred Adobe to make sure that its media-rich content-building tool and player Flash remains competitive. Flash Player 11 brings hardware-accelerated graphics support to the platform.

According to Adobe, the new Stage3D technology in the new Flash Player brings combined 2D and 3D acceleration that is up to 1,000 times faster than the previous Flash iterations. While currently Stage3D is supported only for personal computers, it should make its way to mobile devices in future Flash releases. The advancements offered by Stage3D should bring far more complex graphics development for the player, and allow some developers to use it as a viable alternative for their projects, especially for cross-platform efforts.

In addition to accelerated graphics, Flash 11 now is natively in 64-bit code on all supported platforms, which will allow it to better integrate with browsers and plug-ins that are coded in 64-bit. This along with a slew of new enhancements for developers in terms of security improvements, media handling, and better JavaScript integration will enhance the player's use for future development. Flash also comes baked into Google Chrome, and therefore the Chrome OS that powers Google's Chromebooks.

Mac users take note: Flash requires OS X 10.6 or later running on an Intel platform since Adobe removed support for PowerPC Macs in Flash 10.

Although it's possible that HTML5 will at some point unseat Flash as the dominant code for media on the Web, that won't happen for a while yet since HTML5 standards haven't even been finalized. The Flash Player is a must if you want to experience the Web at its fullest, so users at any level of expertise should have no qualms about installing or upgrading.

Google Chrome

2012-02-01T23:49:00.000-08:00

Google Chrome

Chrome 16 review

The bottom line: Competitiveness, thy name is Chrome. Google's browser is one of the fastest and most standards-compliant browsers available. It lacks some of the fine-tuning you'll find in Firefox, but from the minimalist interface to support for future-Web tech like Native Client and HTML5, the browser is a must.

Review:
Google Chrome continues to mature from a lightweight and fast browsing alternative into an innovative browser on the precipice of a potential browsing revolution with the just-released Chrome OS. The browser that people can use today, Chrome 16, offers highly competitive features, including synchronization, autofill, and standards compliance, and maintains Google's reputation for building one of the fastest browsers available.

Chrome 16 represents a major milestone for the browser, but those expecting to see dramatic changes in major-point updates will be disappointed. For a while now, Google has been pushing features over what it calls milestone numbers, which means that as soon as new features are usable in the beta version of Chrome, Google will likely push them to all users in the stable edition.
First Look: Chrome still shines, 10 versions later

Recent updates to the browser have included support for Native Client in Chrome 14. Native Client, or NaCl, is an open-source technology that allows C and C++ code to be securely run in the browser. It basically lets software run within two protected sandboxes, which will theoretically cut down on browser-based threats dramatically. When completed, NaCl will enable Web apps to run as smoothly as programs that are hosted on your hard drive.

As implemented in Chrome 14, NaCl works only for Chrome Web Store apps, though Google plans to expand NaCl so that eventually it powers the entire browser.

Chrome 15 debuted of a redesigned New Tab page and a redone Chrome Web Store that it links to. The intuitive New Tab page allows you to create custom categories by dragging and dropping apps and bookmarks, and includes navigation arrows on the left and right edges of the page that become more visible on mouse-over. For more, check out CNET's story on how to use Chrome's new New Tab page.

Chrome 16 launches the beginning of changes to how sync works in the browser, with the introduction of multiple user account support. This means that you can now have multiple people, or at least multiple Gmail accounts, running in Chrome simultaneously. However, it's not "people-secure," meaning that although your data might be secured on Google servers, once an account is logged into Chrome, you don't have to re-enter in your account data. Anybody with access to Chrome can see your stuff.

Please note that there are at least four versions of Chrome available at the moment, and this review only addresses the "stable" branch, intended for general use. Chrome beta (Windows (download) | Mac (download)), Chrome dev (Windows (download) | Mac (download)), and Chrome Canary (Windows (download) | Mac (download)) are progressively less stable versions of the browser, and aimed at developers.

Installation
Chrome's installation process is simple and straightforward. If you download the browser from Google's Web site, it will ask you if you'd like to anonymously submit usage statistics to the company. This can be toggled even after the browser is installed by going to the wrench-icon Preferences menu and choosing Options, then Under the Hood, and checking or unchecking Help Make Chrome Better. Depending on your processor, the installation process should take less than 2 minutes.

Interface
Google's Chrome interface has changed remarkably little since its surprise debut in September 2008. Tabs are still on top, the location bar (aka Omnibox) dominates the minimalist design, and the browser has few visible control buttons besides Back, Forward, and a combined Stop/Reload button. Although some users may not like having the tabs on top, we find it to be aesthetically preferable because it leaves more room below for the Web site we're looking at.

One change has been to remove the secondary Page Options button and combine it with the Preferences wrench icon to create space for extension icons to the right of the location bar. As it currently stands, it could be better organized. Some controls, such as page zoom, are readily available. Others, such as the extension manager, are hidden away under a Tools submenu.

Chrome's extensions are fairly limited in how they can alter the browser's interface. Unlike Firefox, which gives add-on makers a lot of leeway in changing the browser's look, Chrome mandates that extensions appear only as icons to the right of the location bar. The benefit is that this maintains a uniform look to the browser, but it definitely limits how much the browser can be customized. Chrome doesn't support sidebars, either, although other Chromium-based browsers (such as Comodo Dragon) do offer the feature. There is an option in Chrome's about:flags, a series of experimental features, that lets you move the tabs to a sidebar.

A minor change in Chrome 11 moved settings pages to their own tab, rather than a dialog box. Chrome 12 extended that configuration to Chrome's synchronization feature. If you sign up more than one Google account in Chrome 16 or later, you'll see the profile icons in the upper left corner on the tab row.

Even with its limitations, the interface design has remained a contemporary exemplar of how to minimize the browser's screen footprint while keeping the browser easy to use and versatile.

Features and support
Chrome 16's features are accessible from the Preferences menu via the wrench icon on the right side of the navigation bar. Version 16 offers a complete range of modern browsing conveniences. The basics are well-represented, including tabbed browsing, new window creation, and a private browsing mode that Google calls Incognito, which disables cookie tracking, history recording, extension support, and other browsing breadcrumbs.

Chrome is based on WebKit, the same open-source engine that powers Apple Safari, Google's Android mobile platform, and several other desktop and mobile Web-browsing tools. However, Chrome runs on a different JavaScript engine than its WebKit cousins, and there are other changes as well.

Along with hardware-accelerated 3D CSS in Chrome 12, we got some interesting security improvements. You can now delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome, which makes sense given that Chrome comes with Flash built in, and there's a new Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files. Chrome's Web app support, which debuted in December 2010, now includes the ability to launch Web apps from the location bar. This gives keyboard jockeys a bit more power to avoid mousing around, more readily apparent in Chrome OS but nevertheless good to have in the regular old Chrome browser.

Mac users now get a warning window when using Command-Q to close the browser.

Print preview, formerly a small but glaring hole in Chrome's feature list, is now present in the Windows and Linux versions. Chrome stable for Mac still doesn't have the feature, which is powered by the PDF reader that comes built into Chrome.

Chrome's tabs remain one of the best things about the browser. The tabs are detachable: "tabs" and "windows" become interchangeable here. Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can be rearranged at any time by clicking, holding, dragging, and releasing. Not only can tabs be isolated, but each tab exists in its own task process. This means that when one tab crashes, the other tabs do not. Though memory leaks are a major concern in Chrome when you have dozens of tabs open, we found sluggish behavior and other impediments weren't noticeable until after there were more than 30 tabs open. That's not an immutable number, though, and different computers' hardware will alter browser performance.

Some of the basics in Chrome are handled extremely intuitively. In-page searching works smoothly. Using the Ctrl-F hot key or the menu option, searching for a word or phrase will open a text entry box on the top right of the browser. Chrome searches as you type, indicating the number of positive results and highlighting them on the page.

Account syncing is another area where Chrome excels. Using your Gmail account, Chrome will sync your themes, preferences, autofill entries, extensions, and bookmarks. You can toggle each of those categories, too. It does not yet offer password syncing, although the password manager has a smart show-password option that keeps it visually separate from the site it's associated with.

Chrome also offers a lot of privacy-tweaking settings. In the Options menu, go to the Under the Hood tab. From here, you can toggle and customize most of the browser's privacy and security settings. Cookies, image management, JavaScript, plug-ins, pop-ups, location information, and notifications can be adjusted from the Content Settings button. This includes toggling specific plug-ins, such as the built-in Adobe Flash plug-in or the Chrome PDF reader (which is deactivated by default).

Like Firefox, Chrome gives broad control over search engines and search customizations. Though this doesn't sound like much, not all browsers allow you to set keyword shortcuts for searching, and some even restrict which search engine you can set as your default. Chrome comes with three defaults to choose from: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The Chrome extension manager, bookmark manager, and download manager all open in new tabs. They allow you to search their contents and throw in some basic management options like deletion, but in general they don't feel as robust as their counterparts in competing browsers. For example, URLs in the bookmark manager are only revealed when you mouse over a bookmark, and you must click on one to get the URL to permanently appear. That's an extra click that other browsers don't require.

Two other low-profile but well-executed features in Chrome are autoupdating and translation. Chrome automatically updates when a new version comes out. This makes it harder to revert back to an older version, but it's highly unlikely that you'll want to downgrade this build of Chrome since this is the stable build and not the beta or developer's version. The second feature, automatic translation of Web pages, is available to other browsers as a Google add-on, but because it comes from Google, it's baked directly into Chrome.

Chrome is also a leader in HTML5 implementation, which is uneven because of the continuing development of HTML5 standards. This will become more important in the coming months and years, but right now it doesn't greatly affect interactions with Web sites.

In the realm of security, besides allowing you to disable JavaScript, Chrome will automatically block Web sites that are known to promulgate phishing attacks and malware threats or be otherwise unsafe. The usefulness of this depends on Google's ability to flag Web sites as risky, though, and so it's recommended to use an add-on like the Web of Trust extension or a separate security program to block threats.

Performance
Based on the open-source WebKit engine and Google's V8 JavaScript engine, Google Chrome debuted to much fanfare because of its rocketing rendering speeds. Three years down the line, that hasn't changed, and the stable version of Chrome remains one of the fastest stable browsers available. The less stable versions, with their more recent improvements and bug fixes, are often faster.

You can see CNET's most recent benchmark tests that included Google Chrome; while that particular version of Chrome didn't do too well, the browser has seen a lot of changes since that test and you definitely should not discount it.

Note that to effectively use hardware acceleration you must make sure that your graphics card drivers are up-to-date. Nevertheless, Chrome remains one of the fastest browsers available, and its rapid version update rate ensures that it is consistently competitive.

Conclusion
It's hard to tell which is faster, user adoption of Chrome or its development. Certainly the two are linked, and due in no small part to Google's ability to lay claim to the "fastest browser" title, even when it may not be strictly justified. The rest of Chrome's appeal lies in its clean, minimalist look, and competitive features that justify its still-increasing market share. Chrome is a serious option for anybody who wants a browser that gets out of the way of browsing the Web

Norton AntiVirus 2012

2012-02-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

Norton AntiVirus 2012

The bottom line: Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton AntiVirus 2012, one of the best antivirus suites available.

Over the past few years, Symantec has completed a course reversal for its Norton consumer Internet security suites. The massive package of security tools works better than it ever has before, with an impressive set of features, some useful new tools including remote management and download stability analysis, and third-party security efficacy benchmarks that are at the top of the heap. Meanwhile, CNET Labs' performance benchmarks indicate that though Norton doesn't leave the smallest footprint on your system, users should see a minimal impact overall.
Norton Internet Security 2012

Installation
For the third year in a row, Norton's formerly sluggish beast offers a smooth and fast installation operation. Once you run the installer, the program is ready to operate in about a minute--impressively fast, and doubly so considering past performance. The installation process is also the first time that you will interact with Quorum, Norton's behavior-based detection engine. You'll be asked to participate by sending anonymous data to Symantec's cloud. Opting out of the data submission, according to Symantec, will not affect your security.

Running the trial of Norton also requires registering the program. Like many programs, Norton used to force open your default browser and take you to the company's registration Web site. Now you can register from within the program. Uninstalling the software left about 10 Registry entries behind, but no other traces were detectable. Overall, Norton's installation experience was fast and hassle-free, with a minimum of configuration options--but the ones that did come up appeared necessary.

Interface
Norton AntiVirus 2012 contains some changes to the 2011 interface, although the design is heavily reminiscent of the previous version. It keeps the dark theme, punctuated by yellow text, and the contrast works well. Changes this year include a reorganized and streamlined Settings interface; a "pinnable" Advanced screen--so that power users can get about their business faster--which also comes with a CPU gauge; and tweaks to the System Status indicator. This year, the interface feels more balanced between the feature display and empty space.

The simplified layout offers Scans on the left, Updates in the center, and Advanced tools on the right. Clicking on one reveals controls specific to that area of protection. At the bottom of the interface is a wide, short map of the world covered with blinking yellow dots. Each one, according to Symantec, represents a threat to one of its users that has been successfully blocked. The Activity Map visual is cute, but completely irrelevant to your personal safety. More interesting is that below the map there are a series of mobile app-style buttons. In NIS you can access the new Norton Management, Norton Mobile, Norton Online Family, Norton Safe Web, and Norton Backup without having to jump to your browser. NAV only has the Activity Map and Norton Backup.

Features and support
There aren't many new features in Norton AntiVirus 2012, but what's new ought to appeal to the kind of person who wants the souped-up security in this robust suite.

One of the better new features is a change to Download Insight. This community-driven tool originally evaluated files being downloaded for security, but now it looks at their stability for other Norton users, too. There are also metered bandwidth options for people on rate-limited connections, and several interface tweaks to make the program easier on the eyes and to make it easier to find things.

The reputation-based security checks where your programs were installed from and when they were installed, and compares that against data from the 58 million users participating in the crowd-sourced Norton Community Watch to see if any of your programs should be red-flagged. Norton's System Insight component has been bumped up to version 2.0; System Insight is the proprietary internal network that warns you when your programs unnecessarily hog system resources. This gives some extra heft to the system performance map, where you can click on any spike and see what caused it.

The third iteration of Download Insight applies the same reputation-based logic to new downloads, and the fourth version of Norton SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Automatic Response) looks for suspicious software behavior and automatically chooses protective actions. You can toggle how aggressive SONAR is in the Settings window.

Along with the quick scan, the full-system scan, and the custom scan for viruses and malware, you can now have Norton scan your Facebook wall for malicious links. There are also on-demand reputation-based quick scans, full scans, and custom scans for users who want Norton to immediately scan their installed programs. After completing a scan, Norton provides users with a summary report. More-detailed information, including scan duration and a deeper dive into threats discovered, can be read under the History option from the main window. There's also a link that you can follow in case you believe that Norton missed something in its scan, although as reputation-based protection matures, on-demand scanning becomes less of an issue when compared with the "always-on" protection offered here.

The bootable recovery tool isn't new, but it now comes with a feature that automatically creates a CD, DVD, or USB-based bootable device. The USB component is especially important on optical-drive-free systems such as Netbooks.

As with the rest of the program, the support options have been streamlined behind a drop-down menu in the top right of the interface. Help opens local support, Tutorials leads to a Web site with extensive how-tos, and the Get Support link accesses the breadth of Norton's customer support in a new window. Here, users can chat with tech support 24-7, explore the user manual, and check out the Norton FAQ and knowledge base. Phone support is also available, although Symantec takes part in the trend to make phone support harder to access by funneling users to online resources.

Performance
Norton's fast installation and comprehensive feature set would be useless without solid performance, and Norton Internet Security 2012 delivers extremely high third-party efficacy benchmarks and strong performance benchmarks.

In a real-world test, Norton 2012 completed a Quick Scan in 2 minutes, 43 seconds; the Full Scan took 1 hour 43 minutes and 54 seconds. While the Full Scan average is comparable to last year's, the Quick Scan was approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds slower than last year's average.

CNET Labs' benchmarks found both Norton Internet Security 2012 and Norton AntiVirus 2012 to have performed well, although not as strongly as some of their competitors. Note that we can't directly compare this year's results with last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1.

NIS 2012 slowed down the Labs' computer boot time by about 11.8 seconds, one of the fastest scores this year, whereas NAV 2012 added an unimpressive 21.2 seconds. This is in line with previous years, which saw NIS do better on boot than NAV.

Both had a very small impact on the computer's shutdown time, slowing it down only by about 4 seconds compared with an unprotected computer. Scan times for both were disappointingly average in the Labs; in previous years, they were aggressively competitive. However, our in-use system performance tests, the iTunes decoding, Microsoft Office, media multitasking, and Cinebench tests, showed both Norton suites having a low-level impact on our test computer. This means that, all things being equal, you're not going to notice much when Norton is running as you go about your computing business.

Security program Boot time Shutdown time Scan time MS Office performance iTunes decoding Media multitasking Cinebench
Unprotected system 40 6 n/a 395 120 342 17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date) 63 15.8 1,136 416 125 348 17,112
Norton AntiVirus 2012 61.2 9.9 1,154 403 125 344 17,007
Norton Internet Security 2012 51.8 10.3 1,066 410 123 343 17,386

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.

In independent threat detection and removal tests, Norton is a top performer. In the AV-Test.org test on Windows 7 from the first quarter of 2011, Norton Internet Security 2011 scored 15 out of 18 overall, one of the better suites tested. The suite had a 5.5 rating out of 6 in Protection, a 5.0 in Repair, and a 4.5 in Usability.

The second-quarter 2011 test, on a Windows XP computer, definitely showed improvement in some areas and regression in others. It scored 13.5 out of 18 overall, a solid midrange score. The suite improved in Protection and Repair with a 5.0 rating out of 6 for both, but Usability dropped to 3.5 most likely due to false positives.

Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 98.94 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 97.31 percent in August 2011 certification testing, but not as high as some competitors, such as Bitdefender. The suite was able to remove 83.3 percent of active malware infections, only slightly higher than the industry average of 80 percent. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Bitdefender blocked 100 percent of the attacks, compared with the average August 2011 certification results of 92.16 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives.

The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Norton Internet Security 2011 toward the front of the class, out of 17 suites tested. Looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to June 2011 found that AVG came in 13th, blocking 99.1 percent of threats.

Dennis Technology Labs, a member of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), found in January 2011 that Norton Internet Security 2011 earned an overall protection score of 142 (PDF), tied with Trend Micro. Norton also had zero false-positive warnings during the test.

Following the path blazed by Norton 2009 through 2011, Norton continues to build a strong performance record based on excellent detection, fast scan times, and low false positives. However, it's clear that according to some tests, there's been some small slippage.

Conclusion
Norton AntiVirus 2012 contains only core security features. All the useful extras you'll have to upgrade to Norton Internet Security to get. In that respect, NAV is much too similar to the free security suites out there, and unless support or the slightly better protection is a major priority for you, we recommend one of those instead.

Spybot - Search & Destroy

2012-02-01T23:31:00.000-08:00

Spybot - Search & Destroy

Spybot - Search & Destroy has been in the antispyware game for a long time offering features we've come to expect in the best apps in the category, but bugs and false positives make it difficult to recommend.

The program checks your system against a comprehensive database of adware and other system invaders. It also features several interface improvements, including multiple skins for dressing up its appearance. Scan results now appear arranged by groups in a tree, and a sliding panel lets you instantly view information about a selected item to help you decide whether to kill it or not. The Immunize feature blocks a plethora of uninvited Web-borne flotsam before it reaches your computer. Other useful tools, including Secure Shredder, complement the program's basic functionality for completely destroying files. Hosts File blocks adware servers from your computer, and System Startup lets you review which apps load when you start your computer.

Unfortunately, the program has the tendency to lock up at times and even during the install process for this review, we encountered several errors. The ambitious feature list and functionality make Spybot a good choice for those in search of a second antispyware program, and recent updates have made it run faster. It still makes errors in flagging spyware that isn't, and overall there are others in the category that do a better job.

Ad-Aware Free Internet Security

2012-02-01T23:23:00.000-08:00

Ad-Aware Free Internet Security

The bottom line: One of the first applications built to find and remove malware and spyware, Ad-Aware's reputation has been well-justified. The latest version adroitly addresses some user concerns, yet performance-based annoyances remain.

Review:

Ad-Aware 9.5 continues the development progress that publisher Lavasoft began in version 8. No longer content with offering only malware protection, Ad-Aware now includes antivirus protections licensed from Sunbelt, the makers of Vipre, as well as interesting in-house improvements.

Lavasoft first started changing Ad-Aware's protection engine more than a year ago in version 8.1, when it introduced Genotype. This heuristics-based technology identified identical snippets of code across multiple threat mutations. In version 9, Genotype received support from what Lavasoft calls "Dedicated Detection." This tech looks inside files, analyzes the code, and creates a loose pattern for finding families of related malware. The company touts that a single dedicated detection signature can detect hundreds of thousands of threats. More importantly, Lavasoft expects that dedicated detection will lower false positive rates by creating more points of comparison.

Ad-Aware 9 debuts new tech

The second new engine, MagmaShield, is proactive. It emulates processor instructions, comparing approved processor-level operations against those that are undefined in the application layer. This means that it aggressively looks at how a file interacts with the CPU and uses that to call out threats faster.

Editors' note: Portions of this review are based on CNET's review of Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free 9.

Installation
Ad-Aware 9.5 Free has a fairly straightforward installation process, simple in procedure. The installer file has been shrunk from around 130 MB in version 9.0 to a 12 MB "stub" installer in the current version. This stub then downloads about 80 MB of data to run the installation, which is still a significant decrease. Ad-Aware has no toolbars and won't attempt to commandeer your default browser's search engine, an irritation that some free competitors still believe in. Installing does require a reboot, which is expected for security software. The install itself was a bit slow, taking more than five minutes including the reboot, yet it's noticeably faster than it used to be.

Interface
Ad-Aware's interface hasn't changed much since version 8, which means that it's still in dire need of a refresh. The main window offers three icons that you can click on to update your virus definition files and engines, scan your system, or check your status on Ad-Watch Live, Ad-Aware's real-time protection engine. Below the main icons there's a button for updating your scan schedule and accessing support, while a toggle button to jump between simple mode and advanced mode sits in the bottom left corner of the interface. The interface's simple mode merely makes some otherwise visible options disappear, hidden behind an extra click. All but the newest of users ought to feel comfortable using Ad-Aware's "advanced" mode.

As you can tell, it's sort of a mess, and we're not done yet. At the top right of the interface are a series of buttons that replicate the three features in the main window, as well as a fourth for accessing "extras". A Settings button sits below those four.

Tapping the Scan button will run a full scan, and there's no way to change this behavior to Smart scan or Profile scan, the Ad-Aware term for a custom scan. Within the Scan window there are tabs near the top for jumping into the scheduler, the quarantine, and the ignore list.

The Ad-Watch Live window will show you which kinds of real-time protection you have running. Process protcetion defaults to on, while File, Network, and Registry protection are available only in the Ad-Aware paid upgrade. Some competitors, such as Avast, offer all of these in their free version.

Features
As mentioned above, the "Dedicated Detection" and MagmaShield engines were the biggest feature improvements in Ad-Aware 9 Free, although there's no direct interaction between them and the user. Lavasoft has tweaked the scheduler behavior a bit in version 9. The feature arrived in the free version only recently in version 8.3. Ad-Aware Free users can only schedule two scans; upgrading to Ad-Aware Pro removes the handicap. Both Free and Pro users can schedule Smart scans, Full scans, custom scans, and can set them to run daily, weekly, monthly, or at Windows startup.

In addition to virus and malware scans, Ad-Aware 9.5 Free offers a browser track sweeper. Accessible from the Extras button, it can wipe your cache, cookies, history, last typed URLs, and tabs from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. The Toolbox, a second tab under Extras, contains options such as additional process-protecting features that are restricted to the paid upgrade.

Ad-Aware has some limitations that make it hard to compare favorably to its free competitors. You can't view other parts of the program while running a scan, and the scan itself lacks a progress meter or a pause button. Ad-Aware Free cannot scan networked drives.

The restrictions placed on the real-time shields also stands competitors like Panda Cloud Antivirus, Avast, AVG, and Avira on a more solid security foundation. Ad-Aware is also missing other key features, such as Web protection and a silent/gaming mode. Advanced rootkit removal is only available in the paid upgrade as well, leaving Ad-Aware 9 Free with a similar problem to the previous versions: the basic feature set is adequate yet lacking.

No major changes were made to the feature set from version 9 to 9.5.

Performance
Ad-Aware 9 Free performed scans on a real-world computer quite slowly, taking close to 2 hours for its first Full scan. The quick, "Smart" scan, which checks only mission-critical areas of your computer for infection, took about 4 minutes in version 9, slightly slower than the quick scan under version 8.3. Meanwhile, version 9.5 averaged 5 minutes, 37 seconds over three cold-boot runs. So, despite Lavasoft's claims that the program has gotten faster, it appears that the opposite is true.

Lavasoft has not submitted Ad-Aware to be tested by any third-party efficacy tests at threat detection and removal, so we can't speak directly to how secure it will make you. CNET Labs has tested the suite for how it affects your system, and found that while it had a lighter-than-average impact on system performance, its scans were the slowest we've encountered so far this year.

Security Program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	57.41	19.18	1,323	420.17	125.17	351	17,097.17
Lavasoft Ad-Aware 9.5 Pro Internet Security	54.4	16.9	2,080	405	125	347	16,884
Lavasoft Ad-Aware 9.5 Free Internet Security	59	12.8	2,076	406	123	342	17,132

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.

These benchmarks show that Ad-Aware is definitely light on your system for startup and shutdown times, at least when compared to the average-to-date. Its impact on in-use programs, especially during the iTunes decoding test and media multitasking test, were the smallest so far this year. However, Ad-Aware's scans were the slowest we've seen by around 200 seconds compared to the next slowest, and around 700 seconds slower than average.

The in-system marks are strong, no doubt, but most people will be looking at scan speed, and that definitely has to be tightened when coming from an underdog position. Conclusion

Longtime fans will notice the changes to Ad-Aware, and the program continues to grow in the right direction after several missteps in recent years. While the free version continues to make improvements and seems to be unwilling to rest on its malware-removing laurels, Ad-Aware 9.5 Free remains undeniably hamstrung.

Hotspot Shield

2012-02-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

Hotspot Shield

The bottom line: The Internet connection protector Hotspot Shield encrypts your traffic to protect you from all kinds of spying while your computer communicates with the rest of the world. It's a must-have utility for anybody who uses public Wi-Fi networks.

Review:
The Internet connection protector Hotspot Shield encrypts your traffic to protect you from all kinds of spying while your computer communicates with the rest of the world. It's a must-have utility for anybody who uses public Wi-Fi networks, but it's also an excellent tool for ensuring on any network connection that you can access sites and data according to your tastes, and nobody else's. Hotspot Shield's Virtual Private Network services are used by more than 10 million at the time this review was written, according to the software publisher AnchorFree, making it the largest VPN in the world.

The browser-independent Hotspot Shield establishes an encrypted connection to the Hotspot Shield servers, and turns all HTTP traffic to the safer HTTPS. By re-routing Web traffic and providing you with a new IP address hosted by AnchorFree, the company is able to ensure that your data isn't plucked out of the open by man-in-the-middle attacks or wireless network spoofing.

In our tests, we noticed that sometimes the program would actually resolve pages faster than when connected without it. This occurs, most likely, because of the geographic location of the company's servers. During a day of hands-on testing on the notoriously pokey CNET public Wi-Fi network, we noticed that Hotspot Shield Elite was remarkably fast. There were no connection lags despite the rerouting, and the program admirably handled high-definition streaming videos from sites such as Vimeo, YouTube, and CNET TV. We'd recommend the program for improving the Wi-Fi speeds alone, nevermind the additional security benefits.

The free version of Hotspot Shield does come at a small cost. The installation opts you in to two toolbars, one from Hotspot Shield and one from Conduit, which redirects your default search and home page. Also, whenever you activate Hotspot Shield, it will open a new tab to AnchorFree.com and begin autoplaying a video. That's seriously annoying, even in a free product that offers such a valuable service. Still, the toolbars and redirects are optional.

Once installed, it appears as a red system tray icon that turns to green when activated. Right-click to toggle it on or off. Choosing the Properties option opens a new browser tab that tells you that you're connected. Hit the Details link to learn more about your connection, including the VPN IP address, amount of data sent in and out, and how long you've been connected. The data transfer rate makes for a useful, quick-and-dirty gauge for people with data caps.

Hotspot Shield now offers an Elite service, which runs ad-free. Elite costs $0.50 per 24 hour session, with a minimum $10 deposit, or $5 per month, or $45 per year. Payment options include credit card, PayPal, prepaid cash cards or mobile phone payments via premium SMS. Aside from Hotspot Shield Elite's preferential bandwidth priority and lack of ads, there are no built-in additional features in Elite. However, at the time this review was written, AnchorFree had arranged a deal with Skype so that new Elite users get two hours of Skype talk time free when signing up.

The company has created multiple ways to circumvent download blockers in countries with strict censorship, too. If you can't access a Web page with the download, you can send an e-mail to win@anchorfree.com for the Windows version or mac@anchorfree.com for the Mac version, and the small installer file will be sent directly to you.

Note that although the Windows version is 2.06, and the Mac version is 1.582, the features are the same.

Even with the installation shenanigans, we highly recommend Hotspot Shield for anybody concerned with privacy. In today's world, that ought to be anybody connecting a computer to the Internet.

RoboForm 7

2012-02-01T23:11:00.000-08:00

RoboForm

You can reduce the time you spend filling out Web forms and logging onto subscription sites with RoboForm. The version 6 update improved usability significantly and replaced the old, clunky autofill window with a less-obtrusive toolbar. If you don't like the standard toolbar placement, you can run it at the bottom of the browser instead. That's the standard placement for Mozilla-based browsers. The program uses encryption algorithms such as Blowfish and AES to protect your data and includes a password generator. You can set up multiple identities with different credit-card numbers, passwords, and contact information. The trial limits the tab instances on each identity to three, but you can make plenty of identities.

Our favorite feature is Login, which with one click will go to a Web page, fill in a form, and submit your information. The program handles check boxes and radio buttons and supports about 20 languages. The new Search field in the toolbar makes finding and accessing any information quick, and we appreciate support for hot keys. Besides returning matching logins and other RoboForm entries, the search box will offer to search Google, Yahoo, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for your term. RoboForm will save active Web users a lot of time.

CCleaner

2012-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

CCleaner

The freeware CCleaner hasn't seen many major revisions since Piriform launched it in 2004, so when you do see a major update, you can be assured that it's going to come with impressive new tools. CCleaner 3 doesn't disappoint on that front, introducing two major new features that make it worth the upgrade.

One is a drive wiping tool that can wipe all the data from your hard drive, but can also scrub only the available free space. As with many of the tools in CCleaner, it's fairly nuanced and allows for a simple one-pass overwrite, a Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning, and a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub. The more passes you select, the slower the deletion process.
Nuanced drive wiper lands in CCleaner 3

Another key improvement to CCleaner 3 has been adding more options to pre-existing features. You can now select specific Internet cookies to keep, across all your browsers, while CCleaner deletes the rest in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. The benefit of this is to keep cookies for specific sites that you know to be safe, such as webmail, while getting rid of the rest that you don't want tracking you. Note that your browser must be closed for the cookie-deleting feature to work.

Other changes in version 3 include improvements to the internal scanning tech that powers CCleaner, and the interface received some minor tweaks to make icons more visible. If you're familiar with previous versions of the program, though, you'll be hard-pressed to find any differences between older CCleaners and the new one. Additional minor changes include a new native installer for 64-bit computers, and environment variables have been added for %SystemDirectory%, %SystemDirectory32%, and %SystemDirectory64%.

Version 3 supports more Windows programs than before, including added support for Microsoft Silverlight Isolated Storage, AVG 2011, Audacity, LogMeIn Hamachi, BitTorrent, and Windows Game Explorer. Pre-existing support has been improved for Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 beta, and the torrent managing client Vuze.

For users who are new to the program, in addition to browser tracks cleaning it will clean tracks from other programs, empty your recycle bin, delete temporary files, and clean your Registry, quickly scanning for invalid entries before removing them. CCleaner will also back up your Registry before you hit delete, in case it accidentally removes a crucial component. There's also a basic, somewhat rudimentary uninstaller for removing any program on your machine. What Registry entries it doesn't catch, the main Registry checker will, but it's a two-step process that dedicated uninstallers handle nicely on their own.

In empirical testing, CCleaner 3 appeared to be marginally faster than previous versions. This is probably system dependent, so users with older computers could likely see significantly faster scan and cleaning times than in previous versions.

Problems with CCleaner are minor at best, and it remains a highly-recommended, must-have weapon against system slowdowns, tracking cookies, and the multitudinous debris that can clutter your computer.

Avira Free Antivirus

2012-02-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

Avira Free Antivirus

The bottom line: An aggressive redesign aimed at making its best-known suite more accessible than before, Avira Free Antivirus 12 combines fast scans with above-average protection for a solid security combo.

Review:
Free antivirus maker Avira debuts a laundry list of changes in its latest major update, basically repositioning the suite to remain competitive in the face of tougher competition from other free security suites and a renewed emphasis on performance from paid competitors. From the new breezy installation to the modernized interface and reputable security, the suite has a lot going for it.

However, it notably lacks some features that many people consider basics even at the free level, so this version may only wind up appealing to existing Avira users and fans.

Longtime Avira fans will note that the suites also have undergone a bit of a name change. The product title "AntiVir" has been dropped, as Avira AntiVir Personal becomes Avira Free Antivirus, Avira AntiVir Premium becomes Avira Antivirus Premium, and Avira Premium Security Suite becomes Avira Internet Security. While product-specific names may work for some companies because of legacy associations, such as the Norton product from Symantec, new user confusion has likely forced security suite makers to streamline their operations.

The suites have also skippped version 11, perhaps driven by a Spinal Tap-esque fear of exploding amps, and gone straight to version 12. It's also possible that the company was thinking of aligning the version number with the release year, as most security suites released in the fall have version numbers that reflect the coming year.

Installation
Getting into Avira has never been easier, as version 12 debuts a two-click install. The company says that it developed the two-click installation as part of its "less is more" strategy, where it offers the same level of protection as before without the hassle. Of course, that's a tacit acknowledgement of prior problems.

Avira 12 renews commitment to security

Anyway, the new install is the simplest of the major free security suites. The two-click process will auto-detect competing security components and remove them, so be warned if you think you're going to be more secure by running two overlapping AVs. Avira won't let you.

Another click will take you past the Ask.com toolbar and search engine re-direct, but at least Avira is polite: it's an opt-in, not opt-out, experience. The toolbar screen itself is a bit unclear: it's actually Avira's WebGuard feature, powered by an Ask.com search engine that's part of the toolbar. There's also an option to have Ask.com become your browser's default engine, although that's not checked by default.

At the end of the installation process, Avira will begin a quick scan. On our test machine, it took about 1 minute, 25 seconds to complete, a completely reasonable wait to endure before the suite is ready to go.

Interface
The new interface is simple and mimics that of many competitors. A left nav shows you your tools, while the center pane focuses on a deeper dive into your security. New on-off buttons make it easy to toggle features, although it's noteworthy that the free version is quite restricted when compared with the free competition.

The new main interface for Avira Free Antivirus 12.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A red banner with the program name serves as a wrapper to anchor the suite, with a Windows XP-style menu bar above it. It doesn't look bad in Windows 7, although it is definitely archaic. The only feature that you can't reach from any other part of the interface except the menu bar is the Help menu.

The main interface is the Status window, with a green check box letting you know when you're safe. It turns to yellow when there are security tasks to perform or when you've turned off a feature, like real-time protection. It turns red when there's something mission-critical that requires your attention.

Below that, you've got two categories: PC protection, and Internet protection. What this really means is that the former protects you from threats locally, while the latter guards you against new threats from attacking you. Under PC protection, you can toggle your real-time protection, manually run a scan, start an update, or upgrade to a paid version of Avira. Use the gear icon next to each option to open the configuration window, which has its own slider in its upper-left corner to quickly change between the standard view and expert mode.

One hint about the system scanner option from the left nav: this is where you would go to initiate specific types of scans, or scans on specific parts of your computer, such as a rootkit scan in C:/Windows. For a generic scan, use the Scan System option from the Status window.

Under Internet protection, you only get one option in Avira Free: Web protection. If you chose to not install the toolbar, then this entire section will appear grayed out.

It doesn't sound like much, but that's the point. This is the easiest-to-use version of Avira yet.

Features and support
This is one area where the changes Avira has made are not so apparent. Longtime users of Avira Free are not likely to recognize much new. The scanner checks for virus, Trojans, rootkits, and adware. There's a generic threat removal engine, but Avira--like many security suites--is much better at preventing threats from infecting you, rather than removing ones you've already got.

The advanced options menu doesn't contain much that's new, either, but the layout is new, and it's quite easy for a savvy person to drill deep into security settings and either extract the information they want or set a very customized level of security. This includes scanning as Administrator from the main interface, a window showing realtime scan performance, configuring how to scan of archives, and a restart reminder in case you enjoy that kind of automated nagging.

The engine powering the scans has been improved, too. Your Hosts file is protected by default, and resource usage has been slashed. And after the daily virus definition file update, Avira still takes over your screen with a pop-up asking you to upgrade.

The company told me that it kept it because its users like it. According to its market research feedback, the pop-up apparently reminds people that they've been protected. Be that as it may, I find it an unnecessary distraction that blocks me once a day from doing something more important than clicking away an ad.

If a problem is discovered, a one-click Fix problems button appears at the top of the Status window. Click it, and even if the fix is something as simple as reactivating a deactivated module, the program will do it for you.

The WebGuard feature, available only if you install the Avira toolbar, takes a more aggressive approach to detecting sites that could be hosting malware before they load on your computer. This is not unlike Avira's competitors. However, for the performance cost to the browser for a toolbar, search result ratings would be a nice compensation. Too bad they're not offered.

Avira 12's WebGuard toolbar.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Features-wise, the free version provides the kind of security that most people will be comfortable with. For people who want more, Avira Antivirus Premium 12 ($29.99 for a one-year license) comes with a suspicious behavior guard for when programs or files that might be trusted act in an unsecure manner; the silent/gaming mode for fullscreen use; and live telephone support. Avira Internet Security 12 ($49.99 for a one-year license) rolls in parental controls; an e-mail spam guard; antiphishing measures; and a firewall that I found to be obnoxiously chatty and intrusive.

While the firewall and parental controls are always relegated to premium status, it seems quite niggardly of Avira to reserve the silent/gaming mode for premium users, when competitors don't and all the while insisting upon a pop-up that can interrupt any activity you're using your computer for.

Performance
Avira's performance in the past has been hit or miss, with strong detection rates but high false positives. Avira's been doing a lot of work in that area, though, and this is one of the best-performing versions of Avira that we've seen.

Avira Free Antivirus 12 shares the same detection engine as its premium upgrade siblings, Avira Antivirus Premium 12 and Avira Internet Security 12, so all three are discussed here.

In a real-world test, Avira completed its initial scan during installation in 1 minute, 25 seconds. However, the new Avira still does not whitelist known safe files on your system, so repeated scans will check out the same file, even if it's got a hash that indicates that it's been unchanged since the last scan. The Full scan averaged 1 hour, 36 minutes over three installs, which is an appropriate benchmark for such a resource-intensive scan.

CNET Labs' benchmarks found that Avira benchmarked well in most system tests, but with room for improvement in the critical test of boot-time impact. Note that while last year's benchmarks were tested on the basic installation of Windows 7 x64, CNET Labs is now using a Windows 7 x64 test bed running Service Pack 1. So while results are more comparable than they would be with, say, a Windows XP computer, there's still a notable difference between the test computers.

Avira Internet Security 12 performed had one of the smallest impacts on computer start up, slowing it down only by 13.1 seconds when the average was 25.3 seconds. However, Avira Free Antivirus and Avira Antivirus Premium slothed along and added nearly 60 seconds each, the two worst suites tested so far this year.

Once we get past that poor first showing, Avira tested better than average on nearly every system test we looked at. As the chart below shows, shutdown time, scan speed, and the in-use system tests of MS Office performance, iTunes decoding, and were almost always better than average, often by a lot. Avira was weak on the Cinebench test.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	65.3	15.4	1,114	415	125	347	17,106
Avira Free Antivirus 12	98.8	12.4	860	409	125	345	17,000
Avira Antivirus Premium 12	100.3	12	1,026	407	125	342	17,125
Avira Internet Security 12	53.1	13.7	959	407	124	346	17,030

Note: All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, higher numbers are better.

Independent testing agency AV-Test.org has marked acceptable scores for Avira Premium Security Suite 10 (Avira Internet Security as of version 12) during the first two quarters of 2011. On a Windows 7 computer during Q1, Bitdefender scored 4 out of 6 on Protection, 3.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 4 out of 6 on Usability, for an overall score of 11.5 out of 18, just clearing the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate.

In the second quarter, on a Windows XP computer, the same suite did slightly better. The suite hit 3.5 out of 6 on Protection, 4.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 4 out of 6 on Usability, for a total of 12 out of 18. However, at that point Avira hadn't updated the detection engines in a while.

When AV-Test.org tested Avira Premium Suite Security 10.2 in July and August of 2011, Avira climbed a bit higher, with a 4 out of 6 on Protection and Repair, and 4.5 out of 6 on Usability, for a total of 12.5 out of 18.

Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."

Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that along with the new name, the suite has made some significant improvements in the level of protection offered. It notched a 99.73 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 99.29 percent in September 2011 certification testing. The suite was able to remove 87.5 percent of active malware infections, slightly higher than the industry average of 84.6 percent. AV-Test.org did not test or did not release numbers for rootkits. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Avira Free blocked 92.7 percent of threats, while the two premium suites blocked 96.4 percent of the attacks, compared to the average September 2011 certification results of 92.7 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives against more than 330,000 samples.

In short, AV-Test.org found Avira 12 to be more effective than Avira 10, although there were suites both paid and free that did better.

The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Avira Premium Security Suite 10 in the top four suites tested. The August 2011 test found that it blocked 98.4 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, only behind Trend Micro's Titanium and Symantec's Norton. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to August 2011 found that Avira 10 did far worse, coming in ninth with a 97.0 percent success rate. So, while Avira started the year off rough, it has clearly made strides to improve and that bodes well if you're considering using version 12.

A third testing lab, Dennis Technology Labs, had much worse news for Avira from its January 2011 test. In its test of high-end suites, including Avira Premium Security Suite 10, Dennis Labs placed Avira second to last out of 11 suites. Avira had an Accuracy score of 28 out of 100, but this did not include false positives. The Total Accuracy score, which does include files that are marked as threats but in fact are not, also put Avira at second to last with a score of 64.5 out of 150. Avira struggled with the lab's Protection test, earning only a 66 percent, second to last and well below the average of 84 percent. The bottom line here is that Dennis Labs and Avira 10 did not mix well, at all.

It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Avira 10 tested weakly at the beginning of 2011, but has made strides to improve and should not be discounted. Still, movement in the right direction is not the same as consistent performance, but things are looking up for Avira at least when it comes to protecting its customers.

Conclusions
Avira Free Antivirus 12 is a solid effort by one of the most popular, and therefore most trusted, security suite makers to address an ever-changing and increasingly more dangerous threatscape. It offers solid and effective free protection, with a newly accessible interface, but it lacks some of the competitive features that other free suites give their users. Also, depending on your system, you might have to prepare for much longer computer startup time, and there's that daily pop-up nag to contend with. We're glad to see that Avira has no intention of straying behind the pack anymore, however, we expected more from this long-overdue update.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

2012-02-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a surprisingly effective freeware antimalware tool. It's a relatively speedy malware remover, with the quick scan taking about 8 minutes even with other high-resource programs running. The heuristics engine proved on multiple computers during empirical testing that it was capable of determining the difference between false positives and dangerous apps.

The app has some nice features rolled in, too. It supports multiple drive scanning including networked drives, context menu options including a scan-on-demand for individual files, and the FileAssassin option under the More Tools section for removing locked files. The interface is simple, but pleasant-looking and well-organized. Tabs live just below the oversized logo, with few options per tab to keep down the clutter. The installation process was fast enough, but interestingly offered up the well-kept changelog and an instant definition file update.

Do note that the real-time protection is restricted to the paid version, as is the scheduler for updates and scans. Overall, though, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a responsive malware remover that does what it should with a minimum of fuss.

Avast Free Antivirus

2012-02-01T02:08:00.000-08:00

The bottom line: After the last version's radical new interface that brought this security stalwart into a visual comparison with its competitors, Avast looks to the future with version 6's edgy improvements.

Review:
Avast made great strides in its previous update. Version 5 set the stage for the modern, massively popular, and free security suite with a new interface that ditched a quirky, late-'90s jukebox style for a more polished look. Easier to navigate, it also became easier to add new features.

Make no mistake; Avast 6 adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions, and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap.

Avast wants you to play in its sandbox

Installation
Installing Avast is a painless process that compares well against its free competitors like AVG, although--like those competitors--it's much slower than installing paid programs like Trend Micro, Kaspersky, or Norton.

Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to completely avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.

Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.

On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot, and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 percent, although it's still a large download at around 57MB for the free version.

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Interface
Avast 6's interface is virtually identical to the previous version's. Perhaps the most major change, aside from a slight lightening of the gray in the color scheme, is the removal of the Windows Explorer-style forward and backward buttons. We actually liked those, since they made it easy to return to a previous pane, no matter how deeply into the settings you had explored.

The only other change is the addition of the Additional Protection tab to the left nav area, which hosts the new AutoSandbox and WebRep feature controls.

For users new to Avast, the sleek user interface is a change that came at the end of 2009. The gray-and-orange color scheme stands out well on the screen, and the tab-based navigation on the left makes it easy to navigate between features. Highlighted with the familiar security colors of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version, and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 6.

The Summary tab contains a second submenu, Statistics. If you're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats, here's where you can get your math geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.

Avast 6 keeps its interface from Avast 5, and adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions, and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Click on a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield, and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.

Below the Additional Protection tab, which we covered above, the Maintenance tab contains the virus chest and manual update buttons. On the top right of the interface live the Help Center and the Settings, from which you can get much more granular control of Avast. This includes everything from toggling the system tray icon to managing updates to password-protecting Avast access. This is also where you can "uninvolve" your anonymously submitted data from Community IQ, the Avast crowdsourced behavioral detection engine.

One last change: a green Like Avast button has been added to the bottom of the left nav that expedites your Avast-related social networking. Fortunately, it's unobtrusive.

Features and support
As mentioned, the two big new features in the free version of Avast 6 are the AutoSandbox and the WebRep add-on. The debut of the AutoSandbox makes Avast the second antivirus option to offer a sandboxing tool for free. Competitor Comodo introduced a sandboxing tool in January 2010. Avast's sandbox probably works differently, as Comodo has a pending patent on its version. And certainly, one of the most frustrating things about sandboxing technology is that there are some indications that it doesn't work perfectly.

The AutoSandbox, new in both free and paid Avast versions, automatically places suspicious programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of file behaviors and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Avast's version automatically places programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, Avast's sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created, or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.

The company hasn't said whether the virtualized state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features.

The AutoSandbox is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.

You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox, and you can deactivate the feature entirely.

Avast 6 also marks the debut of the program joining (or succumbing to) the browser-security add-on, with the new WebRep. Security add-ons have a long-standing word-of-mouth reputation for decreasing browser performance, although Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate's impact meter pegs Avast's plug-in at 0.07 second, well below the threshold of 0.2 second that IE uses as the default upper limit for browser performance impact.

WebRep works with IE and Firefox out of the box, and Avast says it plans to release a Chrome version soon. It supports a search result ranking and Web site reputation service that uses a combination of data from Avast's virus labs and user voting to determine a safety score for a site. User voting is a crapshoot for many security vendors, although Avast is known for its vast user base and their passionate support of the program, so the company's plans to give users incentives to vote could easily work in its favor. And make no mistake, Avast fans are truly fanatics: Avast Free has an average 4.5-star rating from Download.com readers, extremely unusual for a program with more than 15,000 votes.

It's important to note that the add-on installs to both Firefox and IE as you install Avast 6. If you don't want it, it's surprisingly easier to remove from within Avast instead of from within the browser. Currently, removing the add-on using the browser's interface will cue Avast to reinstall the add-on the next time the computer is rebooted.

Many of Avast 6's small improvements are worth noting as well. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode. There's a new sidebar gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you now can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customizations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.

Two features that have trickled down to the free version in Avast 6 are the Script Shield and site blocking. The Script Shield now works with Internet Explorer 8 and 9's protected mode.

Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG and Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's Web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.

If you're running Avast Pro Antivirus 6 or Avast Internet Security 6, the big new feature is the introduction of SafeZone, a virtualization feature that the company envisions people using for secure online banking. The basic difference between SafeZone and AutoSandbox is that the sandbox is designed to allow suspicious activity to run within a safe, walled-off, easily discarded environment, while SafeZone is the opposite. SafeZone creates a secure space that, ideally, prevents threats from getting in.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

SafeZone is accessible from the right-click Windows Explorer context menu, from the middle icon in the Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget, and from the Additional Protection tab in the Avast interface.

The difference between Avast Free and Avast Pro is that Pro gets the SafeZone, whereas Avast Internet Security differentiates itself by including SafeZone, antispam measures, and a firewall.

If you're new to Avast, the core features are what make it one of the best security suites around. The antivirus, antispyware, and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. The adjustable mail and file system shields join the pre-existing behavior, network, instant-messaging, peer-to-peer, and Web shields. The behavioral shield is a common-sense feature, as security software publishers draw on their large user bases to detect threats early and warn others.

Other features include a gaming mode that can be used to permanently "silence" Avast notifications, and an "intelligent scanner" that only looks at changed files after establishing a baseline.

Program scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option. What's useful about Avast's layout here is that you can adjust all Avast-related scans from this tab. This includes Quick and Full scans, the Removable Media scan, and the Folder scan. In a polite turn, running a scan does not prevent you from exploring the rest of the program.

You can also schedule a boot-time scan and access scan logs from the scan tab. While running a scan, Avast will tell you not only how long the scan has taken and how many files have been examined, but also how much data has been tested and how fast it's being tested. As with the summary graphs, Avast exposes a lot of data here.

Performance
As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast 6 only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.

As you can see in the chart below, CNET Labs benchmarked Avast 6 as having a moderate impact on system performance. It wasn't the overall best suite we tested, but the three versions of Avast did perform better than average in every category execpt one.

There were some notable areas where Avast did well. Avast had a minimal impact on startup time, with Avast Internet Security 6 adding 6.25 seconds, Avast Pro Antivirus 6 adding 5.76 seconds, and Avast Free Antivirus 6 slowing down the boot cycle by around five and a half seconds. All three posted a tiny impact on system shutdown, around 1.3 seconds slower than an unprotected computer. Scan times as well were competitive, slower than AVG, Trend Micro, and Panda, but faster than most competitors including Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton, and Ad-Aware. Also, Avast Pro Antivirus posted the best Cinebench score we recorded.

Avast's one point of weakness in the lab was its MS Office decoding test performance, where it was slightly slower than average but by no means the slowest suite tested.

Security Program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	42.5	11.28	n/a	917	180	780	4795
Protected system (average)	50.07	15.00	988.96	1,047.19	200.19	832.69	4,755.73
Avast Free Antivirus 6	47.9	12.4	697	1053	199	798	4742
Avast Pro Antivirus 6	48.21	12.5	665	1083	199	798	4793
Avast Internet Security 6	48.75	12.43	695	1086	201	804	4792

*All tests measures in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.

You can read more on how CNET Labs benchmarks security software.

All the security features in the world do you no good if they don't keep you safe, and on that count Avast performs well in general. However, as results from independent efficacy testing groups indicate, Avast could be better.

AV-Test.org gave Avast 5, the previous version of Avast, a passing rating in its most recent test, on a Windows Vista computer from the fourth quarter of 2010. Avast 5 barely surpassed the minimum score of 12, notching 13 out of 18. It reached 3.5 out of 6 in Protection, 4.0 out of 6 in Repair, and a 5.5 out of 6 in Usability. Many other suites scored the same or higher, including F-Secure, Kaspersky, Norton, and Panda. Among its free competitors during the fourth-quarter test, Avast scored better on the key metric of Protection than Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0, but worse on Protection than Avira 10.0 (4.0 out of 6) and AVG 10.0 (4.5 out of 6).

AV-Comparatives.org, on the other hand, showed progressively better scores for Avast from August 2010 through November 2010 on its "whole product" test. However, Avast's cumulative rate of blocking threats was 96.4 percent, below AVG's cumulative 97.1 percent and Avira's 98.7 percent. Still, the positive improvements in the last two months indicate that Avast has been adapting to changes in the threatscape--never a bad thing. Overall, Avast earned an Advanced certification, along with seven others, including AVG. An Advanced+ certification was earned by four others, including Avira.

Dennis Labs' most recent evaluation of Avast occurred back in August 2010, when the lab scored Avast 5 at 93 percent and above the 87.5 percent average for that test. It was the only free antivirus application to do so. Other above-average scores were reached by G Data, Eset, Kaspersky, and Norton, which scored 100 percent on Dennis Labs' test.

Judging from these results, Avast is clearly one of the best security products around, although there's definitely room for it to improve.

Conclusion
When it comes to your security, Avast Free Antivirus 6 gets a lot right. It's got a usable, uncluttered interface, solid although not stellar benchmarks, and a set of features that keeps it at the forefront of Windows security. Using the Internet safely is no longer just about not getting phished and downloading only known-safe files, and the improvements in Avast 6 address modern security risks comprehensively.

Although we'd like to see stronger efficacy benchmarks in the future, Avast's impact on system performance is light in the most important categories of startup, shutdown, and scan speed. Avast remains one of the best free security options around and is well worth downloading.