Turn on These Hidden Security and Productivity Features in Chrome 79
Chrome 79 is here. Before doing anything else, click the three-dot icon in the upper right corner of your browser on your desktop, click Help, click About Google Chrome, and invoke this update for your system. (Go ahead and update your Android or iOS apps.)
While that continues, here’s a quick overview of all the different settings you can tweak to get the new Chrome 79 performance and security improvements to work. These settings are vague and in some cases completely hidden, so it’s worth taking a few minutes to check and make sure you’re set to use the latest Chrome 79 settings.
Password leak detection
This feature, formerly an extension and then a website , now performs a quick check whenever you enter a new username in Chrome. Assuming you’re signed in to your Chrome account first, look for the “Warn me if passwords are leaked” option under “ Google sync and services “ in Chrome settings. If you don’t see it there, you probably don’t have it yet; Google is implementing this feature because this is what Google does.
If you are, like me, impatient, you can enter chrome: // flags in the address bar, search for password leak, enable discovery, and restart your browser. After that, you should see this option in the aforementioned “Google sync and services” section.
Real-time anti-phishing protection
While you are probably smart enough to avoid websites that are clearly misrepresentations of the actual websites you would like to visit, it never hurts to have all the phishing protection you can get. You never know when a website might be smart enough to trick you into giving up your credentials or billing information.
While Chrome already has phishing protection built in, Google is making it even better in Chrome 79. As the company describes:
“Google Safe Browsing maintains an ever-growing list of unsafe sites on the Internet and transmits this information to webmasters or other browsers to make the Internet safer. The list is updated every 30 minutes, protecting 4 billion devices daily from all types of security threats, including phishing.
However, some phishing sites slip through this 30-minute window, either quickly changing domains or hiding from our crawlers. Chrome now offers real-time desktop phishing protection that warns you up to 30 percent more when you visit malicious sites. “
To make sure you get these phishing updates as quickly as possible, you’ll need to enable the controversial “Make search and browsing experience better” option in the Google sync and services section of your Chrome settings.
Freeze unused tabs so they stop consuming your system resources
The fun new “freeze tabs” feature in Chrome 79 will help prevent background activities from overflowing your browser tabs and overloading your processor. They will still use system memory, so keep a close eye on how many tabs you actually need to keep in your browser. This automatic freeze, which fires after five minutes of inactivity on a tab, won’t happen unless you click on the Chrome flag .
Bring up chrome: // flags and find “Tab Freeze”. Then you will see several options in the dropdown menu:
- Included
- Freeze on – No defrost
- Freeze on – defrost 10 seconds every 15 minutes
- Defective
I myself would leave the setting “On”, but if you want your browser to temporarily “warm up” sites at regular intervals, try the third option.
Speeding up page loading when going forward or backward
This little gem I found in a ZDNet report allows Chrome to load pages from its cache whenever you press the forward or back buttons in your browser (or do what I do and let the extra game mouse buttons send you back . and forward in your story). This should help the page load even faster, and all you have to do is enable this little flag in your browser: chrome: // flags / # back-forward-cache
However, pay attention to the Google warning: “NOTE: This feature is experimental and will lead to various crashes, up to and including loss of user data. Do not enable if you are not using this function – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android “