Disable Auto Scanning For Viruses In Firefox-3 After Downloading

This tutorial will help you Disable Auto Scanning For Viruses In Firefox-3 After Downloading anything from the net.

Firefox 3 has a new feature. It scans all the downloads for potential viruses once the download is completed. This feature usually takes a few seconds to complete, but it was not the case when I downloaded a huge game, which is about 450MB+ in size. The process went on for a while, at one point I wanted to close the download shell, but I was not sure if that would harm my download in any way.

Actually, the scan did not make any sense to me because:

1> The files I downloaded are from an authority site, and we can be sure that there are not around to spread Viruses (I downloaded the game from Electronic Arts, EA)

2> I have an anti virus installed, which I am sure will do a better job when compared to Firefox (I have McAfee).

Guess feature is good for, folks who download from free download sites, and/or hacked software.

I searched the Firefox knowledge base and found out a way to disable the automatic scanning. You can disable the automatic scanning of downloaded files in Firefox 3 by following thise few simple steps:

1> Open Firefox browser and key in about:config in the URL bar and hit Enter.
2> A screen warning you “This might void your warranty! Changing these advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security and performance of this application. You should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing“, might pop up. Select “I’ll be careful, I promise” button.
3> You land in a page which has a Filter. Type browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone and you’ll see under the preference name : browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone, which has a default status, type boolean and the value will be true.
4> Change the value to false from true.

You don’t need to re-start the Firefox browser for the effect to take place, the effect is immediate. Once you are done with the tweak, the downloaded files will no longer undergo the auto scan for viruses.

If I had been a part of this release of Firefox, I definitely would have put a check to see if the system already has a Anti virus which does this, than just forcing users to find their way to disable it!