A way to disable Opera from starting a download before confirming a save/folder?

A way to disable Opera from starting a download before confirming a save/folder?

Hi there!

I tried to search for an answer on these forums, looking for stuff like background downloads and invisible downloads etc., but couldn't come up with my specific issue or advice that would pertain to it. If this has been discussed before I apologize but would like a link.

So, you know how when you click on a link to a file, the save dialog pop-ups (if you've set it to) and the download starts immediately in the background to "save time", right? Well, yesterday this behavior caused me to almost catch a nasty virus. What happened was that I went to a site (a normally safe site that unfortunately had been infected without their knowledge), and the site tried to push a .pdf-file to me. It launched the download dialog, and I did click cancel, but the damage was done, Opera had downloaded the file in the background and it had run itself. Luckily Defender caught it. Still, I had to basically put my computer offline and run all possible checks on it (a full virus scan takes about 20 hours due to my excessive hard drive space) which unfortunately for me means I'm stuck with my netbook for a day, maybe two.

I think I'd much rather just turn off that "preliminary" downloading, since even in a best case scenario it saves like 10 seconds if I have to dig really deep into the file structure to find the place where the file belongs. Is it possible to turn it off?

Well crap.

Even if the file was downloaded there shouldn't be any problems until you lunch/open it.
The av has notified you probably that the file that opera started downloading to a temp folder was infected nothing more nothing less.
If the pdf was opened by a plugin without the window to chose actions(save|open|cancel - open is standard behavior for pdf files with adobe reader[?]) or an application then there could be a problem. There are a lot easier ways(java) gating infected then a file in a temp folder without an extension

When you know you want to download, don't left-click! Rather right-click and choose "Save linked content as..". Download will not start until you push the "Save" button. This will also tell you that the nicebody.jpg you are about to download is actually nicebody.pdf. Works the same in Opera and FF, but not in Chrome where download starts in the background immediately. Well, this is crap!

Left-clicking a link means download, it doesn't mean "Wait a minute until I've made up my mind". You may see the "Downloading file..." dialog and Opera (and FF) start download in background, but don't write to disk. It's done in memory and I don't know how you can catch a virus this way. Chrome downloads everything it cannot render to its download folder - actually downloading to disk. This is crap!

I've set Opera up so that every single file type (apart from images) opens the dialog, nothing opens using a plug-in, nothing opens or saves without me confirming it, but Opera does have the built in function that it starts downloads before you hit save, so small files can get there (Opera's cache/temp folder most likely) before you have a chance to stop them. I also didn't click on anything on the page, it pushed me the file. It did manage to run itself without me touching the file somehow, because it did manage to infect at least one file (cleaned up for now, so no more problems), it quite literally happened like click on the page link in Google -> watch page load up -> See dialog pop up, begin to wonder what the heck this is -> see Windows Defender warn about a trojan. Yeah, there are other, easier ways to catch viruses but that's no reason to make it easier in other ways. =)

Anyway, since it can't be stopped this thread is more or less done. Thanks for the info everyone. =)