Microsoft has released a new plugin for the Google Chrome web browser that helps protect you from phishing attacks by alerting you when you click on a link that would take you to a website that’s known to contain malware.

It’s called Windows Defender Browser Protection for Google Chrome and… it sounds a lot like a built-in Chrome feature that Google calls Safe Browsing.

But Microsoft says its version brings Chrome users the same level of protection they would get if they were using Microsoft’s own Edge web browser. And that’s a good thing, since some third-party benchmarks suggest Edge’s anti-phishing system outperforms Google’s (or Mozilla’s).

Or to put it another way, as security-focused news blog Bleeping Computer points out, it’s nice to have the option of using both Microsoft and Google APIs in the same browser instead of just one or the other.

While Edge is the web browser that ships with Windows 10, it’s also inherited Internet Explorer’s reputation for being the browser that you use once: to download Chrome or Firefox.

Microsoft has added a lot of features to Edge over the last few years and it’s not a bad browser by any means. But with a huge number of Windows users running Chrome, it’s nice to see Microsoft bringing a legitimate security-enhancing tool to the platform.

Then again, while the plugin is relatively small (taking up less than 1MB), it does require the ability to “read your browsing history” and “read and change your data on all smartscreen.microsoft.com sites,” so if you’re not comfortable with that, you might want to stick with Google’s Safe Browsing system.

via myce

 

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5 replies on “Microsoft launches Windows Defender Browser Protection for Chrome”

  1. That’s nice, but Microsoft killed my wifi with the Creators Update. Now I can’t browse for anything with any browser!

    1. I have become to loathe these large biannual updates from Microsoft. You never know what they’re going to break.

      1. @JD:
        I know what you mean , i’ve switched my 2 main Machines over to Win10 Pro for the sole reason that it allows ‘deferred Updates’, aka. ‘Tell MS to fuck off installing anything non security critical for 3 months’, so they have an entire quarter to fix the at best beta quality shit they roll out to Home users twice a year.

  2. Sounds like a way for them to collect all your browsing data and subject it to their very vague privacy policies. No thanks. I know who Google is and what they do. I don’t know what Microsoft does or who their ‘trusted partners’ are or what they do either.

  3. “We get it, you don’t want to use our Browser so we can collect your User Data, would you at least let us share what you let Google see then?”

Comments are closed.