Back in 2020, Google introduced a new security feature to Chrome called Enhanced Safe Browsing. This feature, when enabled, will tell you if sites and downloads are dangerous so you can avoid landing yourself in trouble and preventing your computer from potentially being breached or have malware installed on it.
Recently, Google has announced that they are expanding on the feature and will now extend its Enhanced Safe Browsing feature to cover things like browser extensions as well. This means that when users add an extension to Chrome, or plan to, Google will check it and see if the extension is part of the list of extensions trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing.
If it’s not, users will be notified, but they can proceed and install it anyway. Google will also be improving on downloads protection where it will check the metadata and source of the file to see if it might be suspicious. Files that are deemed suspicious can then be scanned for a more in-depth analysis if the user prefers.
Once again, users are always welcome to ignore these warnings and protections. After all, sometimes there can be false positives, but the protection is there if you want to make use of it and make sure you have a safe browsing experience.
Filed in . Read more about Chrome, Google and Security. Source: security.googleblog