We’re now three months away from 2012, and the new anti-virus beta platforms are rolling out at a furious pace. This week, AntivirusWare.com had the chance to give Avira Internet Security 2012 Beta a look-see.
Better Dashboard, Same Old Prompts
The good news: the Avira Dashboard is much improved over last year’s version. Avira Premium Security Suite 10.0′s main Dashboard consisted of a status readout plus one or two controls for enabling specific features. The Internet Security 2012 Dashboard is a rich, interactive control center. Every major feature of Avira can be activated or deactivated from this one panel.
Avira Internet Security 2012 Beta - Dashboard
Remember how last year, we complained that we couldn’t find how to edit roles in Avira’s new Parental Controls feature even with spelunking equipment? In Internet Security 2012, “Child Protection” is prominently listed on the main Dashboard page, along with a configuration button that displays the Child Protection settings dialog. Unfortunately, the same problem persists: there are no sensible controls for changing the definition of Avira’s default roles.
Child Protection Dialog of Avira 2012 Beta
The bad news: Avira still plagues your computing experience with a swarm of pop-ups. We were greeted with two to three pop-ups every time we woke up our laptop (and about five or six for every reboot). In particular, the application kept warning us of “suspicious access of the registry”, and pleaded with us to run a full system scan.
New Features (?)
We dinged Avira last time out for its lack of sophisticated features, and bemoaned how this obscures Avira’s status as one of the more efficient and accurate anti-virus platforms on the market. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a list of the significant new features in the latest beta. Judging from what we can observe, 2012 doesn’t appear to raise the feature bar.
Most of the revisions we noticed were UI-related. For example, in version 10, the Firewall dialog listed contained a list of all firewall rules docked to the right hand side of the window. In 2012, this distraction is removed; advanced users who wish to tweak their firewall rules can click the Configuration icon.
Firewall Screen - Avira Internet Security 2012 Beta
Beyond this, we found no significant, noticeable improvements. Web Protection and Mail Protection are still threadbare, compared to what other Internet Security platforms offer. We’re sure there’s a lot happening under the hood, but it’s hard to tell without an explicit list of enhancements from the company.
Too Early to Tell?
The two best things we can say about Avira Internet Security 2012 Beta are:
- Its greatest enhancements may be less tangible changes such as enhanced performance and anti-virus protection – areas where Avira has long excelled.
- It’s not 2012 yet! Avira still has time to add new features.