Digital Home Thoughts: Norton 2009 Products Open for Public Beta

"On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta. Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consume fewer system resources, says Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management. As an example, Powledge said that where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of NIS contained multiple copies of the antivirus signature database."

If you're the software testing type, Norton has opened the door for testing their next-generation software products. Personally, I find Norton products to be slow and bloated, but it seems like for 2009 their focusing on slimming things down.