Malicious files have been around for years and there’s really no stopping them. You have spam, adware, malware, popups, and many others that could easily take over your computer, requiring you to spend time and money fixing it up. These malicious files are now going to be brought to justice in the Google Chrome browser by notifying users that a file may be malicious, when downloading.
This new feature, currently only available to Chrome development release channel users and hoping to be available on the next stable Chrome release, uses the Safe Browsing API. The Safe Browsing API holds a list of blacklisted phishing and malware sites and pages that could potentially harm your computer. The API is used by many browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Safari to notify users that a website is malicious.
To start, this new feature will focus on Windows executable files and progress from there. Chrome will notify you if a file is malicious when the site that the file is being hosted on matches a website published by the Safe Browsing API.
This one extra cautionary step could save your computer from harmful files that could easily take over your computer. There’s no stopping malicious file creators, but there’s certainly an effort to try and avoid them at all costs.
