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AVG joins Opera on stage
by Seth Rosenblatt

The first beta of Opera 10.60 was released only two weeks ago, and on Thursday it graduates to a wide release and sheds its beta tag. Opera 10.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux incorporates security enhancements provided by popular freeware antivirus vendor AVG, improves performance, adds further HTML5 compatibility, and makes a minor but noticeable tweak to the browser interface.
Opera users will now encounter this warning page when they try to load sites that have been identified by AVG's real-time detector as malicious.

Opera users will now encounter this warning page when they try to load sites that have been identified by AVG's real-time detector as malicious.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The new security feature indicates that while Chrome and Firefox are looking to further isolate plug-ins and add-ons, Opera hopes to address the immediate threat from malware-infected Web sites. Opera now comes with AVG's real-time Web threat data feed built in. What this means is that when you encounter a page that's been detected by the AVG network to be malicious, you'll see the warning instead. The network is fed by data supplied anonymously by 51 million AVG users from around the world.

According to AVG's press release, the feature uses multiple techniques to protect users. It uses exploit signatures to detect sites serving drive-by downloads, the AVG Online Shield and contextual analysis to detect social engineering scam-driven viruses, and reputation lists for safeguarding against malicious domains and URLs.