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The Race to the Top (of the Software list)
People love lists. Lately, I’ve seen lists for 7 Ways to Look Younger, Worst Dressed at the Grammys, and our favorite, Top 5 Facebook Software Pages.
Late last year, as the number of fans on our popular Facebook page increased, Julia, my fellow Queen of the avast! FREEks, and I noticed that we were quickly gaining on a very famous name in the software category. This software royalty has been around for decades. No matter what you think of it now, it’s a cornerstone of just about everyone’s internet experience, so we watched with astonished glee as our number of supporters and fans edged closer to their number. In December, our awesome avast! Community overtook …you ready for it? Internet Explorer!
We felt like Lady Gaga taking the First Lady of Pop crown from Madonna!
Dear avast! Antivirus users, this small triumph means that our avast! Facebook page is now #4 on the Top 5 Facebook Software Pages list. Our competitive spirit is up, and now we set our sights on the #3 position in the software category. Our next hurdle is a popular browser with 300 million users. It should be a piece of cake; we’re only 1 million fans behind. 
All we need to do is rally together and we can…
BEAT OPERA!
So if you already have a Facebook profile, please like our avast! Facebook page. When you see how much fun we have there (and there is some fun planned for the launch of avast! 8), I hope you will share avast! with your friends too.
Let the race begin!
IE’s long good-bye
It was bound to happen. Some years back, that upstart Firefox tempted us with tabs, add-ons and fun themes. And it seems like only yesterday that Chrome’s speed and minimalist design seduced us even further. Yes, it was bound to happen.
For the first time in ten years, tech blogs are reporting that Microsoft’s web browser, the ubiquitous Internet Explorer, has fallen below 50 percent of global browser usage (you have to factor in mobile browser usage to make the numbers add up). Once the undisputed leader in market share, residing on an astounding 95 percent of the world’s desktops, browser watchers say that IE is in steady decline.
Whether the numbers work or not, and whether IE’s decline can be attributed more to the rise of mobile browsers, than a migration of users to different browsers, we thought it would be fun to look at which browsers avast! users prefer. Here is a breakdown of browser usage among avast! users this year. Looks like our users are ahead of the trend!
Security reminder: An interesting and dangerous fact is that there is still major usage of old versions of Internet Explorer. IE 6 and 7, which are not supported on any version of Windows, are still used by over 25 percent of Internet Explorer users, which equals a bit over 13 percent of all desktop users. Whether you use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome (or any of the others), to keep your computer secure, please make sure you have the most recent browser version and install any patches that are available.
Four browser nets and one phish
Not all browser nets can catch the same phish. One Friday evening, just before I wanted to go home, I received an interesting email.
It contained sentences like “ We recently reviewed your account, and suspect that your PayPal account
may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party” and words like “protected“, “security” and “unauthorized“. Of course, at the end of the email, there were directions to click on a “Paypal” link to update information like login name and password.
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