About 24 hours ago, Google made a beta version of their own browser, Chrome, available to the public.

From a privacy standpoint, we neither like to see GoogleUpdate permanently in the background nor those anonymous usage statistics it wants to send home, but since it's open source, we're hoping for free cleaned-up clones.

From a security standpoint, the idea of restricting rights of browsing processes is something we hope to see spreading to other browsers as well, since we fully have to agree with this precaution (see for example Alter Ego).

But the reason to write a news article about it today is not for adding our opinion on Chrome to the mass of other opinions already out there, but to announce support for Chrome in Spybot - Search & Destroy. As soon as Chrome was available, we started digging into it and have now finished support for scanning and cleaning Chrome cookies, bookmarks and history (thanks to the similarity to Firefox, that was actually no big deal). Immunization is pending and depends on Chromes capabilities for that. You can subscribe to the Chrome support feature request or watch our beta forum if you are interested in the progress.

The new method TeaTimer uses to inform the user about its actions has caused some controversy recently, so we thought some kind of explanation would be useful.

The decision to use balloon tooltips to display the progress was made because they're a Windows standard for informing the user, and following standards is in general regarded as making things easier for the user. Informing about scanned processes was also kind of important for people who did not understand what TeaTimer was doing on startup.

The tray icon also allows to disable any future balloons from its context menu, so they were purely optional. Sadly, so far many users did not look for this option, but came asking for a way to get rid of them, so we feel a change to make it more evident might be necessary.

We also did not expect the combination of an unlucky implementation of balloons in Windows 2000 with users who haven't dealed with tooltips yet. On Windows XP, these balloons contain a visible X than can be clicked to close them. On Windows 2000, you can simple click the balloon itself anywhere to close it, which is not as evident, and the reaction takes some time while TeaTimer is scanning.

Balloons also vanish after a specified amount of time, which we have set to a small value to work immediately. Again, Windows 2000 is a bit unlucky there because is does not count this time down when the user is not actively using the computer. Nice thought, but not fully compatible with the intention behind the TeaTimer messages.

While we prepare a workaround that makes balloon messages easier to understand and get rid of for Windows 2000 users, TeaTimer and main application updates are disabled. Expect an update within a week.

With the release of Spybot-S&D 1.6, our detectives have spent some hard time implementing some of the new technologies to improve Virtumonde detections, increasing our detection range by more than 40% to now more than quarter of a million detection patterns to identify more than one million fingerprints.

Virtumonde (also known as the Vundo Trojan) is a Trojan horse that is known to cause popups and advertising for rogue antispyware programs. It also causes other misbehavior, including performance degredation and denial of service with some websites including Google. It attaches to the system using bogus BHO's (Browser Helper Objects) and DLL files attached to Winlogon and Windows Explorer.

To profit from these improvements, we recommend that you update to Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.6, which will be available through the update function integrated into the application as well starting today, as soon as possible.

And, if you still have any problems regarding Virtumonde please feel free to visit our forum or e-mail our detections department.