FF-3b3 - turning off virus scanner

Discussion about official Mozilla Firefox builds
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Fuziwuzi
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Post by Fuziwuzi »

stephendonner wrote: make it default but offer a way via Advanced prefs or about:config to disable it.
That would be the ideal, in my opinion. That would satisfy the devs who want this to be effective for the average user, but would give us "power users" the ability to turn it off, which has always been the beauty of Firefox/Mozilla.
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pikaunforgiven
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Post by pikaunforgiven »

i have very little clue why the devs refuse to implement it. its not like it would be 'that" hard to do, and its not like every average joe goes in there messing with crap anyway. i suppose the fact that extensions can modify about:config entries probably gets them worked up.... but any antivirus worth a damn scans on access/execute anyway so even if its disabled i dont see a problem.
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Recall
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Post by Recall »

stephendonner wrote:Hi folks -

Thanks for the input from the couple of you who ran the meager test I posted; it's throughly clear that this is a problem, and I'm confident it will be addressed before we ship Firefox 3.

I've updated http://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Firefox3/AVIntegration with your two results.

I'd like to wait on further tests until after https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409815 lands (which should be soon); at the very least, we need to see if that patch alleviates the problem, and we should, if not disabling this functionality outright (as many of you are requesting), make it default but offer a way via Advanced prefs or about:config to disable it.

Note that I'm not responsible for decision-making, but I have made the problem clear to our developers (module owners), and we'll be working together to address it.

I've run numerous tests on this myself, as has Rob Arnold, and we know it sucks.

Thanks for your continued patience,

Stephen


What about my results with NOD32?
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BenBasson
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Post by BenBasson »

pikaunforgiven wrote:i have very little clue why the devs refuse to implement it.

Firefox developers are always against implementing new behaviour and then adding preferences to turn it off without good reason. If it would be enabled by default, the preference is basically pointless for 95%+ of the time. If the feature is broken, it should be fixed or backed out. If this worked properly, would you even think about turning it off? I imagine not.
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mdew
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Post by mdew »

Having an about:config option to disable should a minimum in my opnion, if you look at current anti-virus setup software they all have options to disable such features as email scanning, spam protection etc, and not make it mandatory or have no option to disable...Annoying when I download the latest moz build everyday and it has to do a virus scan everytime (you'd think you could trust mozilla's ftp server), which takes 10-15 secs or so for the scan to be completed. I can see it getting very annoying if the antivirus is forced to scan a 300Mb+ archieve.

In the same way as we're not forced to have the phishing filter enabled, we should atleast be giving an about:config option to disable the anti-virus.
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Fuziwuzi
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Post by Fuziwuzi »

Cusser wrote:If this worked properly, would you even think about turning it off? I imagine not.
Yes, I would, because it is redundant and unnecessary for me.
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Post by a;skdjfajf;ak »

YES .. what he said ^^^

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pikaunforgiven
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Post by pikaunforgiven »

i would disable it simply because im a chronic multitasker even while gaming. if i download something in the background while playing say.... quake 3 arena or unreal tournament, i dont want to be lagged out in the middle of the game simply because firefox decides to take it upon itself to scan everything i download.
right now i dont even have antivirus installed because of it :/
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Post by pikaunforgiven »

yay for us
looks like someone in the bug is working on a way for us to disable scanning after all :D

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412204 for those who dont wanna look through this thread to find it.
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a;skdjfajf;ak
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Post by a;skdjfajf;ak »

pikaunforgiven wrote:yay for us
looks like someone in the bug is working on a way for us to disable scanning after all :D

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412204 for those who dont wanna look through this thread to find it.


I'm not good at coding, but reading thru the patch, I can't find the pref ? Several there, but I don't see one to 'disable'
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Post by Wildmyron »

The pref is (will be if/when the patch lands) browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone

Set to false to disable scanning.
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Post by pikaunforgiven »

excellent, now to add the pref now so i dont have to remember later.
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the-edmeister
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Post by the-edmeister »

Recall wrote:
the-edmeister wrote:Stephen, my concerns are:
1. a pref to turn the scan off entirely
2. a warning when an AV program isn't installed on the system

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2- Vista already tells you this in the security centre, so does xp so I believe that is not a relevant choice.

That's fine for Vista and WinXP SP2 users with Defender, but what about SP-1 users who don't want to install SP-2 and W2K where a "protection suite" isn't provided?
Why give the appearance that a scan is being performed when nothing is happening?

Looks like we'll be able to disable that feature after the patch lands, which is what I want to see happen.


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Fuziwuzi
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Post by Fuziwuzi »

Wildmyron wrote:The pref is (will be if/when the patch lands) browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone

Set to false to disable scanning.
Just added that to my user.js... I hope this sticks. I'll have to remember this as well when in other user forums after FF3 is released and start reading complaints about FF being so slow when downloading files. 8-)
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Yakumo.unr
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Post by Yakumo.unr »

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is in the hourly build I'm using as I post (as are new icons incidentally), I guess it'll be in b3, which, unless I'm misunderstanding the note on the nightly thread, will be tonight "The tree will be CLOSED for FF3.0 b3 tonight "

I'm very please with this, score for the AV conscious user, I still hope the default setting won't cause too much end user backlash.

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