The company plan is to offer a new warning mechanism to Chrome users based on the Google Safe Browsing API.
With the new feature, Chrome will leverage Safe Browsing’s list of dangerous sites to alert users when they may be downloading suspicious executables.
The safety feature will run downloads through the same database of blacklisted files, ensuring that users don’t accidentally open the door to rogue applications, said the company.
Google said that the service will only block Windows .exe files initially. These continue to account for the lion’s share of malware, so that’s no bad thing, but presumably Mac, Linux, and maybe even mobile phone app coverage will follow.
Chrome’s new warning will be tested with a small number of users running the "dev" channel of Chrome before being added to the "stable," or production-quality version, of Chrome 12, Google said.
