Google Chrome now comes with up to 50x faster phishing detection

Google Chrome now comes with up to 50 times faster phishing detection starting with the latest released version 92, promoted to the stable channel on Tuesday.

The phishing site detection speed-up stems from improvements to the Chrome image processing tech used to compare the color profiles of visited websites with collections of signals associated with phishing landing pages.

"Starting with M92, Chrome now executes image-based phishing classification up to 50 times faster at the 50th percentile and 2.5 times faster at the 99th percentile," Chrome developer Olivier Li Shing Tat-Dupuis said.

"On average, users will get their phishing classification results after 100 milliseconds, instead of 1.8 seconds. [..] This speed improvement makes a real difference in security - especially when it comes to stopping you from entering your password in a malicious site!"

Additionally, these speed improvements lead to less CPU time needed, which, in turn, contribute to a general performance boost and less battery drain while browsing the web.

The Chrome 92.0.4515.107 release that's rolling out over the coming days starting yesterday also includes security updates addressing 35 high, medium, and low severity vulnerabilities.

Faster and faster each release

Google has been working on improving its web browser's performance for a while now, recently announcing a significant performance boost in Chrome 91 due to improvements to the open-source V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Chrome is executing JavaScript code 23% faster with the inclusion of a new JavaScript compiler and the use of a new way to optimize the code's location in memory, as Google revealed.

Starting with Chrome 89, released in March, Chrome's browser process now requires up to 22% less memory on Windows after adding 8% memory savings in the renderer and roughly 3% in the GPU, while also improving the web browser's overall responsiveness by up to 9%.

Last but not least, in Chrome 87, Google further optimized the browser's performance leading to 25% faster start-ups and 7% faster page loads.

Google Chrome also delivers up to 10% faster page loads starting with version 85 with the help of compiler optimization technique known as Profile Guided Optimization (PGO).