Google's Safe Browsing Enabled For All Android Chrome Users

Google announced on Monday that its Safe Browsing feature has been extended to millions of Chrome users on Android. The company said that the Safe Browsing client on Android is part of Google Play services, starting with version 8.1 and the first app to use it is Chrome, starting with version 46.

“We’re now protecting all Android Chrome users by default”, - Noé Lutz, Nathan Parker, Stephan Somogyi; Google Chrome and Safe Browsing Teams wrote in an online post.

Users just need to look at Chrome Settings > Privacy menu to verify that Safe Browsing is enabled or not. Chrome will display a warning message while preserving users’ privacy, just as on desktop.

Bearing in mind that network bandwidth and battery are the “scarcest” resources on mobile device, the developers worked around these two factors “to best protect mobile users”. They also made sure that the information about riskiest sites was sent first when they can get only a very short update through.

“We also worked with Google’s compression team to make the little data that we do send as small as possible”, the post read. “Together with the Android Security team, we made the software on the device extra stingy with memory and processor use, and careful about minimizing network traffic. All of these details matter to us; we must not waste our users’ data plans, or a single moment of their battery life.”