Has anyone tried Jetico Personal Firewall yet? I installed the latest beta a few days ago and so far I'm strangely drawn to it.
It's a rules based firewall with stateful inspection, much like the new Kerio 4.1 betas, but without all the bloat and resource consumption. It reminds me of a Kerio 2.1.5 with more advanced configurability. The main executable is only 262K, which I find amazing considering all the program's features and so on. Cpu usage is about 1% on Win2k. Pretty good. Reminds me much of Kerio 2.1.5 in those terms.
It's not, however, for beginners. The interface is very different and somewhat confusing and complicated at first, until you get familiar with it and the layout of all the rules. But once you get used to it, it really seems to be quite configurable and powerful, something that I really like.
You see quite a lot of pop-ups, which at first seem to be very repititive, until you realize that it's just creating detailed rules for every app you approve and so on. Some beginning users may think that it's buggy, but in reality it's just creating specific rules for each app, sometimes asking several times and so on.
You can edit all your rules. Very powerful in general. It does require that you do some rule editing with new apps. Some might find this annoying, but I find that once I get the rules the way I want them, then it's very nice.
It's still beta software, but I've only seen one bug so far, which involved the popups for new programs. The firewall itself seems to be very solid so far.
I'd be curious to hear other people's impressions of it.. I've been testing Jetico and also Kerio 4.1 beta, and so far I'm leaning a little toward Jetico at the moment.
It's available here.