Disable Automatic Virus Scanning in Firefox 3

Martin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:38:43 +0000

Firefox 3 is making use of built in virus scanners to scan downloads automatically after they have been fully downloaded to the system. This feature is only available on Windows and if an anti-virus application is installed on the user’s system. While this feature might be a good way to avoid downloading malicious files it might on the other hand be the source of complications like delays, freezes or that harmless files (false positives) are blocked by the anti-virus software.

I personally do not think that such a feature is necessary due to the real-time protection that most anti-virus applications provide which will scan the file eventually before it can be executed.

The Mozilla team created a new preference that gives Windows users the option to disable the automatic virus scanning in Firefox which comes in handy if you have a anti-virus software installed but do not want it to scan the downloads or encounter difficulties because of this.

Type about:config in the Firefox location bar and filter for the string browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone. The default value of that parameter is true which means that scans will be done whenever a file is downloaded. Setting it to false will disable the automatic virus scanning in Firefox 3.

During research I came upon another error that is connected to the Download Statusbar extension. If you receive the error message Anti-virus Program not found after a download completes in Firefox 3 and have the Download Statusbar extension installed you need to set the path to the anti-virus program manually in the Download Statusbar options.

Tags: anti virus, firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3 anti-virus, firefox 3 features

gHacks technology news » firefox 3 anti-virus

Disable Automatic Virus Scanning in Firefox 3

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