The probably last maintenance release of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 is finally ready, available starting today on the first mirrors, with more becoming available as they're added. It will also be available through the integrated updater soon after it is online completely.

Among its bugfixes and new features are support for the latest Opera releases, support for Googles new browser Chrome, fixed support for fresh older Firefox installations, improved support for fast user switching while Spybot is running, plus a few more bugfixes.

A preview of Spybot 2.0 will also be available as soon as servers have adjusted to the additional 1.6.2 release load.

We're nearing the end of the year, Spybot-S&D 1.6 is out for about half a year now, and 2.0 is nearing beta. An important part of our 2.0 preparations of course evaluating where we could do better, we dug through a heap of statistics, and wanted so share a nice one with you:

Spybot-S&D 1.6 already improved the scan speed a lot, still, people complain about the time a full system scan takes again. This graph shows a "nice" explanation: the number of detection patterns used to detect malware has doubled since the release of 1.6 in July this year, to 343,003 detection patterns in this weeks update.

The graphs first steep increase can be explained with the addition of detections that needed the new capabilities of the 1.6 engine, and should you wonder about the following valley, that was a point where the new capabilities were used to reduce the amount of patterns needed, without actually reducing the detection range.

Conclusion? We have a massively improved detection range, and we're going to improve the scanning time this costs in 2.0 to counter the negative side (speed) of it.

This week, we're proud to report about a special event we visited last week. We get our share of "virtual" prizes and are proud about them, but they can't beat a physical trophy, which, sitting always present on a shelf, is a very nice sign of bundled encouraging appreciation by you, our users.

Last week, Deutsche Telekom's download portal softwareload.de presented the results of their Software of the Year 2008 survey in thirteen categories, and Spybot - Search & Destroy made the Gold prize as best Freeware, personally presented in 14 pounds of glass that'll look quite impressive among its colleagues. We thank all users who have voted in our favour there, even though we were lazy enough to not even advertise the voting here.

We're not just sitting on these merits of course, but are working hard on Spybot-S&D 2.0. We've justed added a screenshot gallery to the already existing weekly blog and project tools milestone for those curious about the future.