Hello there, its been a while since our last blog post about AdwCleaner. The reason is simple: the new release of AdwCleaner, v6.000, is now available for everyone on the official download page!

AdwCleaner banner

Thanks to the new code base, it’s considered as a major release which brings countless improvements, bug fixes, and new features. Here are a few important ones:

AdwCleaner interface

The most visible change is probably the UI. It has been refreshed with a refreshed logo and flat graphics elements. Also, the main UI is now reduced by default, and the results are shown only at the end of the scan.

AdwCleaner interface

It makes it easier to use. Moreover, the “Uninstall” button has been moved to the “File” menu in order to avoid misunderstanding with the “Clean” button.

Still on the UI part, the number of detected elements is now shown on the right side during the scan.

A new Log Manager is also available, listing all the previous logs (Scan, Clean, Quarantine and Debug). Each log file is now easily accessible with a double click on it.

The Options menu has been moved to a new window with checkboxes and radio button for a clearer usage.

Options GUI

Less visible improvements have been made to the compilation process and the RAM usage. It now consumes ~45% less RAM than the previous major version (v5).  

Even if we took care of the whole source code, the browsers modules have been significantly improved, with the support for several new Chromium based browsers such as Vivaldi, a new preferences file scanner and more... Also, the different profiles are now correctly handled.

We've totally refactored the translation system. It now uses GNU Gettext which makes it easy for everyone to use and contribute. You can refer to the documentation if you’re interested.

 

Also, we updated the EULA to follow a new feature, metrics. The added part is this one:

4.4 PRIVACY

This software may collect and send anonymous statistics related to the Software to ToolsLib. Is collected:

* Software version

* language identifier

* mode of execution

* scan duration

* clean duration

* number of found elements

* number of cleaned elements

* number of elements not cleaned

* uninstallation action

These data are purely technical and used for research and development regarding the software.

With v6 release, some basic statistics may be sent to our internal server. These data are non-identifiable (i.e not linked to a user) and are used to improve the software and to publicly share fancy graphs in a near future.

We’ll also post some technical blog posts about our internal metrics system to give you more details about how we deal with a huge quantity of metrics (around 100 Million per month).

Speaking of figures, on the last month more than 60 Million of updates have been made to the database from all over the world. Adding people running AdwCleaner in offline mode, it represents a huge number of users!

A lot of individuals, but also public organizations (very famous schools for instance), small-sized and multinationals companies (including famous advertisers, computer hardware and electronics manufacturers) are using AdwCleaner and it gives us the motivation to continue to improve it and brings new features.

That’s why the work on CLI interface is currently in progress, along with other improvements.

 

If you want to contribute, please get in touch!

We are really thankful to everyone who has taken part for this release. Thank you all!

AdwCleaner v6.000 is available on the download page, and the documentation has been updated.