Downloads Panel reopens for previous session's download to show "This file contains a virus or malware." warning again
Categories
(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement, P3)
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People
(Reporter: cpeterson, Unassigned)
References
Details
Steps to reproduce
- On Windows, load https://github.com/mozilla/mozregression/releases/tag/4.0.17
- Click to download mozregression-gui.exe
- Firefox will download the .exe.
- Firefox's Downloads Panel will then open and report "This file contains a virus or malware." That error is not true and is not this bug (it is bug 1647533). Regardless, you don't run this .exe to reproduce this bug.
- Restart Firefox.
Expected result
When Firefox restarts, the Downloads Panel should not open. I did not download any files in the new session, so there is no reason to open the panel.
Actual result
When Firefox restarts, the Downloads Panel will open and report "This file contains a virus or malware.", even though the download was from the previous session.
I tested and can reproduce in Firefox 89, Beta 90, and Nightly 91.
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Comment 1•5 years ago
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We do this because the user may not have noticed the failure in the previous session, and then they may assume it went well, when it didn't. Failures may also happen late in the session, even during shutdown, the user would have no way to notice that.
Unfortunately in some cases this persists for more than one session (Bug 1685737), and that's annoying, but I don't think that showing it for at least one session is necessarily a bad idea.
Because the download panel is a notifications panel in the end, one thing we could evaluate is to open the panel at the next session only if it was not opened after a download failure. Thus, if a download fails but you don't open the panel, next session will open it, if you open the panel (thus see the failure) next session won't do anything.
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Comment 3•5 years ago
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Bug 1685737 make us automatically remove "insecure" downloads on startup if they are older than 5 minutes.
We need a more general solution for all kind of blocked downloads though, because the problem is not limited to just "insecure" downloads, auto-purging them after some time seems ok, but I'm not sold on the 5 minutes approach. It may work for malware, but for not-so-critical errors we should give way for the user to notice the notification. I'd evaluate a sessions approach where if the download notification is not handled for 2 sessions we remove it.
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Comment 4•5 years ago
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Or, alternatively, we could start counting "impressions" for each download, every time it's shown in the panel we increase it, and after certain number of impressions we remove unhandled blocked downloads.
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Comment 5•5 years ago
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Is there a way to get rid of this popup? I mean I tried to empty the downloads list which works for the current session but after that the malware/virus download items are again in the downloads listing in the next session. I also tried to the delete my complete history and cache but this annoying popup is still there for every new session. For your info I have enabled the download icon in the address bar to be visible always and not only when there is an active download.
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Comment 6•5 years ago
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Okay, I solved my problem now simply by starting a new download. Still the described behavior shouldn't happen!
(In reply to Manuel Grießmayr from comment #6)
Okay, I solved my problem now simply by starting a new download. Still the described behavior shouldn't happen!
This worked for me, thank you for providing this solution as I tried everything else, including deleting everything, wiping all of my history, and more. Firefox refused to believe me regardless of how many times I removed the file from the popup, clicked it, and so much more related to using that panel.
There needs to be more trust when a user manually removes an item from the download panel which states that the file may contain a virus.
My issue arose in that I had deleted the file immediately before I clicked the "remove file" button in firefox which thereafter led to firefox refusing to believe the file had been removed.
I'm fine with false positives but, this behavior from firefox is not acceptable.
Description
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