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Disable Automatic Virus Scanning in Firefox 3

Martin Brinkmann — 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.

Scan downloads automatically with Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:21:49 +0000

I was looking for a way to automatically scan specific file types immediately after finishing the download instead of scanning them when unpacking or executing them. This way I could sort out malicious files immediately without having to worry about some files that contain viruses or other sorts of malware sitting on my hard drives for a longer period of time.

The Firefox extension “Download Scan” sends a request to a scanner whenever a download of a certain file type has finished. The scanner will then scan the file and report back as usual if viruses, trojans or other malicious code has been found.

Several options have to be configured before you can use the extension. The most important one is of course to select a scanner that should be used to scan the downloaded files. This might sound easy but can be tricky.

I’m using AntiVir as my virus scanner and had some troubles locating the correct executable for the job. After some trial and error I was able to use avcmd.exe to scan the files. I suggest you either take a look at the website / faq / helpfile of your scanner or do trial and error as well.

After choosing the scanner you may exclude certain file types from being scanned and add arguments that shall be passed to the scanner as well. I did not research that yet but the scanner that I have chosen is opening a new DOS window for every file that is not automatically closing. This could get really annoying when downloading a lot of files in a short time.

I suspect there must be some argument that I could add that would close the window automatically if no virus was found.

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