Chrome's Real Time Protection: Say Goodbye to Page Load Delays

Security shouldn’t affect browser performance or speed. Google is now applying this to the “Safe Browsing” feature in Chrome, which recently gained the ability to check threats in real time. While protection checks are ongoing, Chrome doesn’t block page loads. Google is testing the feature with the name “Safe Browsing Async Real Time Check”.

Google Safe Browsing

Safe Browsing is a security feature in Google Chrome that protects users from phishing and malware attacks by warning them when they attempt to visit a potentially dangerous website.

Google continues to improve security for users running Chrome worldwide. Three years back, intending to increase the safety of the web, Google launched “Enhanced Safe Browsing”. Since then, the company has continuously worked behind the scenes to improve real-time URL checks, block new attacks with AI, provide deep scans for files, and offer extra protection from malicious Chrome extensions.

Note: Enhanced Safe Browsing is optional and can be turned on from the security Settings in Chrome.

Chrome’s Standard Protection mode

Standard Protection of Safe Browsing works by checking every site the user visits against a locally stored list of bad sites, which is updated every 30 to 60 minutes. But currently, phishing domains have learned new tricks and most of them exist for less than 10 minutes, making them difficult to block. That’s why Google has upgraded its standard protection mode to check against a list of malaware and phishing sites in real-time without sending your history to Google servers.

Safe Browsing Async Real Time Check

While the Chrome Prerender feature may estimate and load users about to visit for faster page loads, with the Safe Browsing real-time feature Chrome has to delay page load somewhat before checking with Google’s list of bad sites to ensure the site is good to proceed for user or not. While this may take time and block page load, Google is now addressing Safe browsing with Async real-time checks, which means real-time checks are done asynchronously without affecting page load time. Here is how to enable it.

How to enable Safe Browsing Async Real Time checks in Chrome

1. Launch Chrome
2. visit chrome://flags/#safe-browsing-async-real-time-check
   
3. Select Enabled
4. Restart the browser.

Google defines the new improvement to Safe Browsing as below.

Safe Browsing Async Real Time Check
Safe Browsing real-time checks are conducted asynchronously. They no longer delay page load. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia, Lacros

The feature is available in unstable builds of desktop and Android. Google may test and gather feedback before making it available broadly for the public in the release version.

So, Chrome will no longer block page loads when checking the sites you visit page for security issues, what’s your take on this improvement? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.