What is Enhanced Safe Browsing and How to Enable/Disable it


👤 Diwas Poudel    🕒 02 Jul 2023    📁 TECH

What is Enhanced Safe Browsing?

Enhanced Safe Browsing in Google Chrome is a valuable security feature that helps you protect against harmful websites, downloads, and extensions.

When you enable these features, upon visiting any website URL in Google Chrome, such as text, images, JS, or downloading extensions, this information is sent to Google. If the content is found to be malicious, Google sends it back to Google Chrome, and Google Chrome blocks that content. However, if the content appears to be non-malicious, you will receive the content as usual.

How enhanced Protection Works
fig. How enhanced Protection Works?

So, here Google identifies and blocks 

  1. Malicious websites
  2. Malicious downloads
  3. Malicious extensions.
Malicious : Website , downloads and extension
fig. Malicious: Website, downloads, and extension 

So we can say it somehow to protect you from phishing and malware attacks and ransomware attacks.

If you're worried about your online security, I suggest enabling it in your Chrome browser.

If you have disabled this feature and then you have access malicious website then you may get the following messages:

If you access malicious website then you may get this message.
fig. If you access a malicious website then you may get this message.

Let's look at how to enable Enhanced Safe Browsing in Google Chrome.

Enable Enhanced Safe Browsing in Chrome

Note that this feature is not enabled by default. So we have to enable it if we want.

To enable enhanced Safe Browsing in Chrome follow the below steps:

  1. Open Chrome and click on the three dots in the top right corner of the window.
  2. Select Settings  fig. Chrome Settings Option
  3. Select Privacy and Security.
  4. Click on Security  
  5. In the Safe Browsing section, select Enhanced Protection  fig. Toggle on to the "Enhanced Protection" option
Please note that I am providing these instructions for Windows 11 and Chrome. However, they should also work for other operating systems such as Linux or Mac.

Disable Enhanced Safe Browsing in Chrome

For this follow similar steps 

  1. Open Chrome and click on the three dots in the top right corner of the window.
  2. Select Settings  
  3. Select Privacy and Security.
  4. Click on Security  
  5. In the Safe Browsing section, select Standard Protection or No Protection.

My recommendation is to select Standard Protection.

Downsides of using Enhanced Safe Browsing

Some minor downsides of using Enhanced Safe Browsing is 

  1. Google Chrome sends more data to Google and people may be concerned about privacy.
  2. It can sometimes block legitimate websites.
  3. It can also slow down your browsing.
Since there are several benefits, I recommend enabling the Enhanced Safe Browsing features.

What is the level of Enhanced Safe Browsing?

There are two levels of Enhanced Safe Browsing and they are:

  1. Standard
  2. Enhanced
Standard Safe Browsing Enhanced Safe Browsing
It provides basic protection against phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. it provides advanced protection against phishing, malware and ransomware attacks.
Users who possess a fundamental understanding of security measures are advised to opt for this option. If you desire the highest level of protection against online threats, it is strongly recommended to enable Enhanced Safe Browsing.
Standard Safe Browsing does not use machine learning to identify the attacks. Enhanced Safe Browsing use machine learning to identify the attacks.

Do Enhanced Safe Browsing available in another browser?

Ans: Yes, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge also have these safe browsing features.