Nick Peers

WinStep Software Technologies has announced a $5-10 price rise across its entire range, the first since the company launched in 1999. This follows on from the company’s recent updates to its flagship products with the releases of WinStep Nexus 18.10 and WinStep Xtreme 18.10.

Despite the point release, version 18.10 unveils another raft of significant tweaks and updates, including the unveiling of a new Office theme for productivity-focused desktops.

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Security developer Avira has released Avira Internet Security Suite 2019, a brand new version of its flagship security tool for Windows.

Version 2019 brings together all the vendor’s tools under one roof, and adds one new component to the mix: Password Manager. This comes with a Security Status feature that will alert users to global account, website and password breaches.

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Customizable web browser Vivaldi 2.0 has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux. This challenger web browser, which has boasted over 1,500 improvements since its initial launch in 2016, unveils yet more major changes.

Chief among these is the long-awaited debut of browser sync to bring feature parity with other major browsers. Other tweaks have been made to existing features while the underlying browser engine has been updated to Chromium 69.

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dotPDN LLC has unveiled Paint.NET 4.1.1, a minor update that follows less than a week after the major Paint.NET 4.1 release. This includes two notable bug fixes, reinstates Adjustment menu shortcut keys and one minor improvement.

The update was preceded by Paint.NET 4.1, which added support for GPU-powered effects, copy/paste for selections and bicubic resampling for the Move Selected Pixels tool.

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Mozilla has released Firefox Quantum 62.0 for desktop, along with Firefox for Android 62.0. Version 62 ships with several minor new features, the most visible of which is support for up to four rows of personal customizations -- top sites, Pocket stories and highlights -- on the new Firefox Home menu.

Android users gain the most notable changes in Firefox 62: scrolling performance is improved, and there’s the promise of faster loading times over Wi-Fi by loading from the network cache if it’s quicker than the disk cache. Users also gain more control over notifications with the addition of a 'Product and feature tips' option.

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Acronis has launched Acronis True Image 2019 for Windows and Mac, a major new release of its popular local and cloud backup tool.

The 2019 version is dubbed the 15-year Anniversary Edition, celebrating the milestone release. New features added include a dedicated survival toolkit, ability to manually clean backup files and widened anti-ransomware protection.

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Moonchild Productions has unveiled Pale Moon 28.0 for Windows and Linux, the first major update of its Firefox-based browser since November 2016. Also available in 64-bit form, Pale Moon 28.0 features numerous changes and updates.

The new build unveils the fourth iteration of its own browser rendering engine, Goanna, which was first adopted back in 2016. There are also major updates to its JavaScript engine, media backend as well as newly introduced support for the WebGL2 standard.

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Mozilla has released Thunderbird 60.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. Also released in portable form for Windows users, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s free and open-source email client.

Version 60 unveils a new look -- named "Photon", along with newly designed light and dark themes. Elsewhere it now adds support for WebExtension themes, plus makes substantial improvements to various elements including the calendar and attachment management.

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Bitdefender has unveiled the latest versions of its security product line for desktop and mobile. Top-of-the-line Bitdefender Total Security 2019 is accompanied by mid-range Bitdefender Internet Security 2019 and focused Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019.

The new releases unveil a selection of new security tools, including Network Threat Prevention, Ransomware Remediation and Security Advisor. It also promises "major advances" to its Advanced Threat Defense system and improvements to the Web Attack Prevention module.

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Paragon Software GmbH has released Paragon Backup & Recovery 17 Free 64-bit (also available for 32-bit), a brand-new version of its free (for personal use) backup and restore tool for Windows PCs.

Version 17 sees the program gain support for incremental and differential backups for more faster backups and more efficient use of available drive space. It also unveils a brand-new user interface with slick, user-friendly modern UI. This has made certain aspects of the program -- restoring selected parts of a backup, for example -- trickier to find.

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Popular open-source image-editing tool GIMP 2.10.4 has been released by the GIMP Development Team. The latest version of the popular cross-platform image editor adds a new Simple Horizon Straightening tool to its feature complement.

Performance is improved thanks to asynchronous loading of fonts on startup, while macOS users can rejoice: official builds for OS X have been restored.

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Opera Software has released Opera 54.0, the latest version of its Chromium-based browser for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The new release adds two new features: the first allows users to set up customized news feeds on the main Speed Dial page. The second makes it possible to recover the browser and settings more easily thanks to a visible new Update & Recovery menu section.

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Mozilla has released Firefox Quantum 61.0 for desktop, along with Firefox for Android 61.0. The new release sells itself on major performance improvements, security updates and some user interface changes and tweaks. Also improved is the bookmark sync function and access to search engines.

Performance enhancements are numerous in Firefox 61: first, there are updates to Quantum’s CSS support to speed up page rendering, which apply to both Android and desktop users.

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Almost four years after the last major release, German developer Ashampoo has unveiled Photo Optimizer 7 for PCs running Windows 7 or later. The commercial tool offers a variety of quick and easy fixes, including various one-click optimizations tools.

Highlights include a complete user interface redesign -- including new dark theme look to accompany the growing number of apps sporting the eye-friendly look, "greatly improved" optimization tools and various other tweaks and improvements.

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Protecting your personal information has made big headlines in 2018, and will continue to do so as hackers continue to outwit even the biggest firms. This is what makes our new software giveaway so essential: a year’s license for Sticky Password Premium.

Sticky Password is a suite of products for mobile and desktop that allow you to store your online passwords, form fills and credit card information securely -- our giveaway will give you access to all its Premium features across all supported devices, including Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

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