avast! 2014 BETA released!

No, I’m not going to post a link here due to the nature of the product (still being a beta), but I can tell you that you can get it on official avast! forums. Shouldn’t be too difficult if you are interested in testing it before the release.

Now, I’ll write some first few minutes impressions about this new version. And I must say they are mostly positive which is very good.

The biggest change is the interface, something no one can miss (unless if you are blind of course). All the fiddly settings have now been removed from the main interface, no more billions of shields and statistics pages, updates page, no more direct access to hundreds of tweaks and settings. All you have direct access to are the most important settings and features like Quick Scan, Virus Chest, Software Updater, Browser Cleaner etc. So, for a casual user, it kinda feels like slightly more advanced MSE. But for those advanced users, you can still get ALL the existing settings and tweaks, so you can fiddle with them till you die 🙂 Sure some related to separate shields are now gone, because shields have been consolidated, but if I’m honest, I don’t really miss them.

If you’re an advanced user, you might be in a worry now, but I can calm you down, it looks and feels really well. You don’t really need to fiddle with all those settings all the time and once you do in the main settings, they will most likely remain that way for the rest of usage time.

Oh and I really like the new animated trey icon. I didn’t like the rotating icon in the past so I kept it disabled most of the time (rotation, not the icon), but the new one looks like a pie cutout from the orb which moves from right to left side. It’s not even annoying and looks kinda cool.

This is pretty much it. Yes, it’s BETA and thus has few glitches like the magnifying glass icon instead of the actual Virus Chest icon and few other things like old yellow progress bars during scans, but that will all get sorted out before the FINAL version release.

Another big change is the avast! Online Security plugin for browser. This is how it looks in Firefox on my blog. As you can see it offers variety of privacy features plus enhanced phishing and malware detection. Rating has also been simplified to Good and Bad options only, so no more fiddly settings. It is again a bit twitchy on some pages where its graphics become a bit weird, but it works. And I really don’t like its browser icon (that “a” logo with a dot in the middle). But I guess this is just temporal graphic during beta…

It feels really fast and works surprisingly well for a very first beta of such major release so I’m feeling very confident about it.

More info will come once I get more in-depth info.