Over the past year, Google has expanded the number of devices that its Safe Browsing protections can work on. As a result, the company today announced that its service for presenting warnings before nefarious links now works on more than three billion devices worldwide.
Safe Browsing works by throwing a bright red warning page that users have to explicitly bypass before accessing sites that are recognized by Google as having malware or are compromised in another fashion. These protections first arose in 2007, but have significantly expanded in terms of the threats it counters, as well as the devices it works on.
Today, Google announced that Safe Browsing now works on three billion devices worldwide. Since the company’s last update in May 2016, the coverage jumped from two billion.
In the past year, Safe Browsing expanded to Gmail on the web, as well as third-party Android apps. Developers, notably Snapchat, can integrate protections that check URLs being presenting from them to end users.
Meanwhile, Safe Browsing protects against more threats including malware and unwanted software on macOS, and more aggressive labeling of sites.
Google noted in its blog post today that Safe Browsing is “integral” to the recently rolled out Play Protect on Android. With iOS 10 last year, Safari on iPhones and iPads last year adopted a “new, efficient Safe Browsing update technology, giving iOS users a protection boost.”
Going forward, Google notes better optimizing for mobile devices and low-bandwidth situations, as well as better taking advantage of artificial intelligence.
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