Google has offered what it calls Safe Browsing protection for users of its Chrome web browser for a while now. Today, the company announced a change in the standard version of Safe Browsing that should offer even better protection against malicious websites.
In a blog post, Google stated that before today, the standard version of Safe Browsing stored a list of hostile websites on your PC or mobile device. That list was updated every 30 to 60 minutes. However, Google has since discovered that a typical malicious website is only active for less than 10 minutes, on average.
Today"s change for Chrome users means that Safe Browsing list is now accessible on Google"s servers so that updates to that list are made in real time. Google says this should cut down on phishing attacks by these sites by as much as 25 percent more compared to the old method.
The company added that this change will "encryption and other privacy-enhancing techniques to ensure that no one, including Google, knows what website you’re visiting." Another post on the Google Online Security Blog offers much more technical info on how this new setup works.
This new standard Safe Browsing change is available now on the Chrome desktop and on the iOS version, and Android device owners should get this change later in March.
Google also announced that the Password Checkup feature for Chrome on iOS has been improved. It will not only alert users if they have passwords that have been labeled as compromised, it will also message users if one or more of their passwords has been duplicated or is considered to be a weak password.
Recently, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla made a rare multi-company team up so they could help create Speedometer 3.0, the latest version of the popular web browser benchmark tool.