I’ve been playing with some new software. Lavasoft released Ad-aware 6.0 last week and Opera 7.0 came out around the same time too. Now, I’m going to talk about both of them together since the interaction between the two apps actually brought about results that made me like one and dislike the other :p The new interface in Ad-aware seems nice – it’s slick and easy on the eye. I don’t know how much things have changed functionality-wise since I wasn’t a big Ad-aware user even before 6.0 – I simply used to run a full system scan every once in a while. (Incidentally, did I mention that Ad-aware now has three versions and the free release, which is one of the three versions, is not out yet?) The things I did notice about the new Ad-aware though was the inclusion of plug-ins, the ability to update reference files directly from Ad-aware and a feature called Ad-watch.
Now Ad-watch supposedly blocks pop-ups, attempts to take over your browser and webbased installations but the first time I noticed Ad-watch in action was when it closed my running instance of Opera 7.0 since it said that it detected a pop-up – either Ad-watch does not work with Opera or it is not fully tested. Either way, I don’t like Ad-watch though the rest of Ad-aware 6.0 seems to work fine enough. Which brings us to Opera 7.0 – now I installed Opera 7.0 since it boasted a really slim distribution (3MB or so without the Java runtimes) and because I had kept on hearing about all the good features it had – let me tell you, it’s all true 🙂 The first thing I noticed when I restarted Opera after Ad-watch closed it, was that all the pages that I was browsing when Ad-watch closed Opera were there, I then noticed that Opera even maintained the history for each page and that I could browse back or forward even though the browser had been restarted and the next thing I noticed was that even my downloads were preserved since I had a couple of downloads going at the time when Ad-watch closed Opera! I was hooked and I decided to start using Opera instead of Scope :p
Of course, if I took the time and effort, I could add the features that Opera has into Scope and some of the features that Opera has are indeed on the to-do list for Scope since a user had asked for it. I do miss some of the stuff that I had with Scope/IE since Opera does seem to have problems rendering certain types of pages – I think mostly CSS based but all in all, I love the stability in browsing that Opera provides since it seems to save the current browser state each time you open a new page – yesterday I had a power failure and my session information was safe even after the power failure! What more could you ask for?