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Google’s ‘Safe Browsing’ alerts to become more prominent as deceptive software detection improves

If you’ve ever been browsing the web and seen the above warning, you’ve probably done one of two things. You either quickly click the “Back to safety” button, or you navigate into the “Details” section to tell Chrome that it’s being a helicopter mom — and go about your “dangerous” browsing. Although I haven’t encountered this page too many times, I definitely fall into the latter category when I do.

Today, Google announced that as its detection of unwanted software on the web has improved, these alerts are going to become more common in your web browsing experience. Specifically, in the coming weeks, you’ll see “more warnings than ever before”…

As per the company’s blog post:

In the coming weeks, these detection improvements will become more noticeable in Chrome: users will see more warnings (like the one below) about unwanted software than ever before.

We want to be really clear that Google Safe Browsing’s mandate remains unchanged: we’re exclusively focused on protecting users from malware, phishing, unwanted software, and similar harm. You won’t see Safe Browsing warnings for any other reasons.

It’s clear that Google wants to do everything it can to protect users from unwanted software, and more warnings against websites that have been determined to be undeniably guilty of serving it can only be a good thing. The company wants to make sure, though, that users and webmasters understand that its policies aren’t changing. Warnings like the above are only to protect users from “malware, phishing, unwanted software, and similar harm,” and you won’t see them for any other reason.

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