Google Chrome Latest News Update: New Rules Introduced to Make Browsing Safer

Google Chrome is about to change to make extensions more secure.

The American tech giant has been working on ways to detect malicious Google Chrome extensions and address how they automatically gain access to personal data over the browser for years now, but their developers may have finally found a solution to the problem.

Google has announced that, starting with Google Chrome 70, users will have the option to restrict extension host access to a custom list of websites. That means users will finally specify which site can be accessed by an extension.

“While host permissions have enabled thousands of powerful and creative extension use cases, they have also led to a broad range of misuse - both malicious and unintentional - because they allow extensions to automatically read and change data on websites. Our aim is to improve user transparency and control over when extensions can access site data. In subsequent milestones, we’ll continue to optimize the user experience toward this goal while improving usability,” Google noted in their blog post on Monday.

This is important because extensions can easily manipulate any website a user goes to.

Google also noted that they are introducing a set of new requirements for developers of extensions on the Chrome Web Store. Developers will now have to participate in a two-step verification process to access their Google Chrome Web Store accounts. Furthermore, extensions with obfuscated code that prevent reverse-engineering will no longer be allowed in the Chrome Web Store starting January 2019.

According to Google, over 70 percent of malicious extensions that are blocked from Chrome Web Store contains obfuscated code, so that explains the need to get rid of them.

As noted by Google, they will be introducing a new version of Manifest (version 3) in Google Chrome next year with a handful of improvements like more narrowly-scoped and declarative APIs.