For those of you out there using one of the real browsers (among others, I am pointing at Firefox), you might find that version 3 of Firefox, while being a brilliant browser for the rest, built-in virusscan on completed downloads is a bit annoying. In my case, it always freezes for about two seconds while initiating the scan. Plus, having a good virusscanner already active, I don’t really see the point.
You can disable this feature by typing about:config in the address bar, and then filtering on browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone. Double click this line to set the value to false.
Problem solved.
Room of a pleinolijf 
August 6, 2008 at 20:04
good to know. I’ll shut this off at home. Just to be safe, I’ll leave it on at work.
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August 11, 2008 at 04:36
that was pissing me off, cheers
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August 14, 2008 at 21:11
thanks alot! kinda annoying…
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September 1, 2008 at 07:33
Thanks. I was about to switch back to Internet Explorer.
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September 2, 2008 at 19:17
Thank you!!! That was bugging the shit outta me. Made downloading three small pictures from a trusted source take about 20 seconds.
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September 24, 2008 at 00:29
thanks it was pissing me off with files that had no viruses
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February 5, 2009 at 13:56
Awesome. Thanks alot. My computer would freeze for a good 5 minutes every time it scanned.
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February 26, 2009 at 01:43
great tip, thanks
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March 21, 2009 at 12:30
Thanks for this simple trick. My Firefox was ALWAYS deleting downloads aftre virus scan, and this was getting REALLY annoying. Problem solved by disabling Virus Scan in FF3
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April 5, 2009 at 04:22
How good is that scanner anyway? Is it always up to date, or only every new firefox version?
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April 5, 2009 at 12:53
As far as I know, it uses the scanner installed on your system. Seems pretty obvious…
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May 28, 2009 at 11:07
It may be you av thats the problem. Ive not noticed any problems and would rather disable on-access scanning in my av, and surf with limited privileges, and only scan downloads, for better overall performance.
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July 17, 2009 at 21:30
Thanks!!
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December 13, 2009 at 08:42
Thanks! That was really starting to get on my nerves while downloading clients files. XD
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May 3, 2010 at 23:36
Great TIP
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May 11, 2010 at 13:38
Thanks dude. It was my only complaint with FF.
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May 11, 2010 at 13:45
One more tip:
FF needs to be restarted to work.
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June 14, 2011 at 08:21
Thank you thank you thank you! I’m pretty savvy as far as not clicking on .exe files and such. So a time-wasting scan, every time I try to download a picture, is ridiculous. You’ve saved me some hair-pulling. Appreciate you.
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