Google Chrome 79 Brings Enhanced Security and Anti-Phishing Features

Google has released Chrome 79 with a number of enhanced security features and improvements for lower CPU usage.

On the security front, when you type your credentials into a website, Chrome will now warn you if your username and password have been compromised in a data breach, and suggest that you change them everywhere they were used.

Google first introduced this technology earlier this year as the Password Checkup extension. In October it became a part of the Password Checkup in Google Account settings, and now it has evolved to offer warnings as you browse the web in Chrome.

In addition to password warnings, Chrome has brought its anti-phishing protections to desktop. Google’s Safe Browsing maintains a list of unsafe sites on the web that refreshes every 30 minutes, but Google found that some phishing sites were slipping through that 30-minute window, either by quickly switching domains or by hiding from Google’s crawlers.

To counter this, the desktop phishing protection is real-time, and should warn users when visiting malicious sites in 30 percent more cases. Google is rolling out this protection to everyone with the “Make searches and browsing better” setting enabled in Chrome.

Chrome 79 also introduces automatic tab freezing, which aims to reduce the browser’s CPU usage, especially when lots of tabs are open. With automatic tab freezing, Chrome pauses any tabs that have been in the background for a while so that they don’t load content or do anything else that could tax the system.

Users will still be able to play audio in a backgrounded tab, but if there’s no interaction with a tab for a while then Chrome will freeze it until the user returns to it.

Google Chrome for Mac is a free download available directly from Google’s servers. Google Chrome for iOS is a free download for iPhone and iPad available on the App Store.