Avast’s HTTPS Scanning interferes with Firefox and other programs

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Avast’s HTTPS Scanning interferes with Firefox and other programs

Security companies such as AVG, Kaspersky or Avast release new versions of their products each year to the public. The updates do introduce new features from time to time and may also change the interface of the program as well.

Avast released its 2015 lineup recently and one of the new features that all of its antivirus programs ship with is HTTPS Scanning.

It enables the program to detect and decrypt protected traffic using its web filtering component. This alone is highly problematic considering that the program is tapping right into protected data streams but the current implementation is causing all kinds of issues on top of that.

Firefox users for example may notice that the browser won't close anymore because of Avast's HTTPS Scanning feature. This may not happen all the time when Firefox is closed but users reported that it is happening frequently. That's however not the only issue that Firefox users may experience if Avast is installed on the computer system the browser is running on.

Firefox's add-on update check may be blocked by the security software as well.

The Mozilla Firefox web browser is not the only program that is affected by issues though. Spotify's Web Player may not be able to connect to Spotify for example with Avast 2015 running on the system.

Users who experience issues after installing the latest version of Avast 2015 have two options:

1. Disable HTTPS Scanning.
2. Uninstall Avast completely.

It is thankfully pretty easy to disable HTTPS Scanning in the application.

1. Open the Avast dashboard on the affected system.
2. Select Settings from the left sidebar menu.
3. Switch to Active Protection.
4. Click on Customize next to Web Shield.
5. Uncheck the "Enable HTTPS Scanning" option and click ok.

This turns off the feature in Avast and problems that you have experienced should be a thing of the past. There is no option to turn off the HTTPS Scanning feature in Avast during installation. While you can disable the Web Shield during installation, it impacts more than just HTTPS scanning and is generally not recommended. (thanks Sören)

Source: ghacks