Safe Browsing on Chrome is now a lot safer with real-time protection

One of the features of Google’s Chrome browser is Safe Browsing. This basically detects malicious websites and warns you about them so you don’t accidentally give away sensitive details or have malware installed on your computer. For the most part it does a great job, but now Google has given it an update that will make it even better.

For those wondering how Safe Browsing works, basically Chrome will check the URL of a website you visit against a database of known malicious websites. According to Google, this database is updated every 30 to 60 minutes, which is pretty frequent. But the company notes that these days, many unsafe and malicious websites have adapted.

They can exist for only a few minutes, which is enough to steal your information or install malware. This is why Google has updated Safe Browsing with real-time, privacy-preserving URL protection. This is done by checking against a list maintained on a specific Safe Browsing server. This will be updated as soon as a malicious website is detected, instead of every 30 to 60 minutes.

Google is also working with Fastly who will operate a third-party “privacy” server. This will help strip away potential user information which means that your IP address will be hidden. These upgrades are already available for Chrome users on iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Android users can expect the update in the coming weeks.