I am writing this post in response to one of our readers who could not find a way to disable Google safe Browsing in Firefox and IE. Today we will talk about how to do that  in Firefox. Even though I think its a great feature protecting your from malacious sites, some of you would like to disable it due to privacy concerns.

For those of you who are not aware of the privacy issues related to this, I will quote few paragraphs from Google Safe Browsing for Firefox FAQ page.

11. What is the Enhanced Protection Feature?

If you enable Enhanced Protection, the Google Safe Browsing Extension will provide more up-to date protection by sending encrypted URLs of sites that you visit and limited information about the site content to Google for evaluation. For information about how we protect your privacy in this and other usage data, please see the Google Privacy Policy.

12. What information is sent to Google when I enable the Enhanced Protection Feature?

When enabled, the entire URL of the site that you’re visiting will be securely transmitted to Google for evaluation. In addition, a very condensed version of the page’s content may be sent to compare similarities between authentic and forged pages. For example, if the condensed ‘fingerprint’ of the page you are visiting matches the ‘fingerprint’ of a popular bank’s site but the page’s URL is different, that’s a good sign that the page you are on is designed to mislead users.

If you disable Enhanced Protection, no information about the pages you visit will be sent to Google unless you visit a page Google Safe Browsing identifies as potentially unsafe. In this case, we will only send the action you choose to take to help refine our anti-phishing algorithms. Please note that enabling Enhanced Protection gives the Google Safe Browsing extension access to the most up-to-date fraud information about each page you visit.

Even though the FAQ applies to google toolbar Feature of firefox, I was not able to find specific details on what happens when google toolbar is not installed.

Here is how you can disable Google Safebrowsing Feature in Firefox:

To DISABLE:

  1. Type about:config in adressbar of Firefox.
  2. Type safebrowsing in filterbar. Now Change the following Values
  3. browser.safebrowsing.enabled FALSE
  4. browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled FALSE
  5. browser.safebrowsing.remoteLookups FALSE

Thats all and the feature will be disabled now. Even though, My advice is not to disable it as Disabling it may increase the risk of getting infected.