Google Chrome will soon prevent all suspicious downloads
Google is working on a new option to further strengthen the security of its web browser.
Google Chrome has already favored secure connections when browsing for a while. With version 90, Chrome first introduced an option to load all pages using the HTTPS protocol by default. When the website consulted did not support the secure protocol, the browser automatically switched to HTTP.
Later, with Chrome 94, Google strengthened its system by introducing a new “HTTPS only” option. The latter, which has been generalized on most web browsers, was intended to strengthen security when browsing the web by choosing to display in the browser only web pages using the HTTPS protocol. As a result, the web browser no longer automatically switches to HTTP when websites do not offer secure browsing. The user, then stopped in his tracks, then sees a warning page appear indicating that he is about to load an unsecured Web page.
But Google’s web browser could very soon benefit from a new feature aimed at further strengthening your online security.
Automatically blocked insecure downloads
According to code spotted by 9to5Google in Chromium Gerrit (a collaborative tool for developers to review browser code), Google is about to expand its HTTPS-only module for all file downloads. As soon as Chrome detects that a file to download uses the insecure HTTP protocol, it will be automatically blocked by the browser. This new option thus goes further than what the browser currently offers, since several new scenarios are affected by this blocking. The browser will block all downloads from an insecure web page, using an insecure redirect, or whose final URL is not in HTTPS.
However, this blocking will remain optional and it will always be possible to ask Chrome to lift this blocking in order to finalize the download of the requested file. This new security option, still under development, should initially only be available in Chrome as an experimental feature. It will initially only be usable after manually activating the flag appointed #block-insecure-downloads from the page chrome://flags which brings together all the experimental functions of Google’s web browser. It should also not be available before Chrome 111, which is scheduled for release in March 2023.
