Chrome 92 gets improved phishing detection and becomes less CPU intensive

Google has announced a new version of Chrome, Chrome 92. The new version should be rolled out in the coming weeks and promises improved phishing detection, which also makes Chrome less CPU-intensive.

Every time a user visits a page, Chrome evaluates whether it is a phishing website, by comparing it with known phishing sites for color use, among other things. This happens in the browser, which normally causes significant CPU usage. Chrome 92 will do that fifty times faster, according to Google, while the CPU usage of the browser would be reduced by 1.2 percent. The tech giant writes that in a Chromium blog .

In order to be faster and to require less processing power from the CPU, Chrome will no longer store RGB colors per hashmap for each pixel in color detection, but will index them by color. In this way, three times fewer pixels have to be counted. In addition, contiguous pixels of the same color are merged before counting. If a web page background is largely the same color, it needs to count fewer colors than when each pixel is analyzed separately.

In this way, Google promises to be able to detect phishing 2.5 to 50 times faster in Chrome 92, which equates to 1.8 seconds faster for the average user. This also ensures that Chrome requires 1.2 percent less processing power from the CPU. This should also ensure less battery consumption on laptops.

In addition to this improvement, the new Chrome update has a list of security improvements . Users with an Android smartphone can more easily manage permissions for, for example, location data per website; that feature should also come to other platforms later. iOS users can now also lock their incognito tabs via Face ID, Macrumors writes .

Chrome users in version 92 can also now launch the browser’s built-in safety check from the address bar by typing “run safety check.” When users do this, the web browser looks at the security of saved passwords and Chrome checks, among other things, whether rogue browser extensions are installed. Furthermore, site isolation is improved in Chrome 92.