Website-Watcher 11.0 Beta 3

cricri_pingouin

Reviewing 10.1 (Apr 9, 2010)

Let me reiterate what has been said: comparing Website Watcher with products such as UpdateScanner and UpdateWatcher is ludicrous. I do use Firefox, and I did try UpdateScanner. However, WW has a feature which is critical in my view, namely regular expressions support. I quickly stopped using UpdateScanner because the lack of regex makes it largely inadequate. For instance, if I was checking the Fileforum Firefox page, I just want to know if there is a new version, not if there is a new comment or its average rating changed. That's where WW blows the competition out of the water, and despite searching/testing at length, WW stubbornly remained my tool of choice. Don't get me wrong, I'd be delighted to see a serious cheaper contender, but we are nowhere close to see it happening with the alternatives mentioned.
It is true however that quality doesn't come cheap, and I do find the price hikes of WW to steer towards being prohibitive, hence a point taken out, and why I stick with v5 (which itself didn't offer much more than v4).
To conclude: although it is not always the case, in this case don't listen to the freetards as you do get what you pay for. I tried UpdateScanner, didn't pay anything, and didn't get anything.
Shrek: if your definition of bloatware is "offers sufficient features to flexibly carry out everything you might need", then yes, WW is definitely bloatware. Size-wise, the installation package lets you make it portable. My installation on my pen drive is 5.3MB in 55 files (excluding bookmarks archives of course). If this is bloat, Firefox+UpdateScanner on your pen drive would be a hell of a lot more (and yes, you could technically use WW to browse, although that's not its purpose). But then you were not trying to be honest.

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