avast! blog

As we get close to our launch date for our new Avast! Free Antivirus, version 5 we have an exciting new agreement with Google to announce. Starting in mid-November, we will be giving our new users an option to install Google Chrome when installing Avast. And to be clear here since I think some readers were reading too much into this entry.  We are not forcing Chrome on users.  It is entirely up to the user–to download/install is entirely up to the user and nothing is hidden.

Personally, I think Google Chrome is an exciting new browser. As you can see below it is very clean—a single menu bar and a combined search/url entry window.  It also launches very fast, its source code is open source, and most important for Avast users, it has some real neat features that complement the Avast security. You can read more about it here: http://www.google.com/chrome?hl=en.

As you can imagine software companies approach us all the time wanting us to bundle their products with ours. We have always said no to these arrangements. However, with Chrome we feel that it is a nice complement to our product. And Google’s Google philosophy is similar to ours—Chrome are both full-featured excellent products that happen to be free.