A software firewall has to really stand out to succeed in the crowded market, but ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering does just that. This firewall easily beats both previous A-List holders (Norton and BlackICE) for ease of setup, flexibility of configuration and real-world maturity. All you have to do is accept the secure defaults and follow the Wizards, or you can get your hands dirty in the configuration files according to your ability and confidence.

Like Norton Personal Firewall 2003 (May 2003, page 58), ZoneAlarm scans for existing Internet-enabled applications and allocates trust levels accordingly. Also, every new program trying to access the outside world will throw up a prompt to allow Internet access once, always or never.

New in this release are increased authentication of low-level security coding – making it more resilient against hijacking – and a hardening of the program control code to provide protection from theoretical dangers.

Then there's the fingerprinting of application components, which protects the user against the next generation of Remote Access Trojans that pretend to be legitimate software. What's more, the new Automatic Network Detection Wizard has no problems with wireless network detection or instant naming management.

ZoneAlarm really starts to move ahead of the competition with the amount of information provided about alerts: you can either ignore alerts or track them down using a trace function, which automatically takes you to the relevant details waiting at the ZoneLabs Website.
There's even intelligent ad filtering thrown in, which has a useful feature to only block ads that take more than a set time to load.

ZoneAlarm is more than just a personal firewall, and while large businesses should invest in hardware-based protection, there's still plenty of room for a mature, network-friendly software application to fill the gap between the home user and corporate enterprise. And ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering is that program.