Bitdefender Quickscan is to my knowledge one of the first browser based antivirus. Quickscan is available from the Firefox Add-ons website and has become one of the most download security extensions from the Mozilla add-on website. The premise of Bitdefender Quickscan is to give a user peace of mind as a second opinion antivirus. This means that a user should already have a free antivirus with a real time scanning capabilities installed and updated. However, when a user wants to be extra assured that their browsing experience is safe, run a Bitdefender Quickscan.
The Quickscan antivirus engine is cloud based. This means that the scanner will perform an initial scan on the PC or MAC computer. Once a suspicious file is located the file is uploaded to the cloud (Bitdefender's servers) where it is extensively analyzed for malware properties. The advantage to this is that Bitdefender's servers (extremely powerful mainframes) are able to run multiple scans on one file and even sandbox the suspicious file. This also means that a user doesn’t need to constantly download antivirus definitions because Bitdefender's servers are updated instantly with the latest virus definitions. The disadvantage to cloud based scanning is that each suspicious file needs to be uploaded to the cloud. This means that if one has a slow internet connection, performance could be severely hampered.
The Quickscan application is perhaps one of the smallest antivirus applications. The size, 768 kilobytes is even smaller than Prevx antivirus which is advertised as the lightest (smallest) antivirus. On the test system, Quickscan finished its scan in 43 seconds and scanned 670 files. This fast performance means that Quickscan meets or exceeds its performance expectations.
