Google this week announced plans to incorporate warnings about malicious downloads into its Chrome browser.
Chrome already has a "Safe Browsing" mode, which Google said "has done a lot of good for the Web," but there is still plenty of harmful content floating around on the Internet.
With this update, Google said it will go after downloads that "use social engineering to entice users to download and run the malicious content," like sites hosting free downloads that actually do things like display spam ads, perform click fraud, or steal passwords.
"The new feature will be integrated with Google Chrome and will display a warning if a user attempts to download a suspected malicious executable file," Moheeb Abu Rajab with the Google Security Team wrote in a blog post.
The warning will read: "This file appears to be malicious. Are you sure you want to continue?" with the option to Discard or Save.
To determine if a download is questionable, Google will display the warning for any download URL that appears on the latest list of malicious Web sites published by the Safe Browsing API.
"The new feature follows the same privacy policy currently in use by the Safe Browsing feature. For example, this feature does not enable Google to determine the URLs you are visiting," Rajab wrote.
The feature will first be tested with a small subset of users on the Chrome development release channel, but Google said it hopes to make it available to everyone in the next stable release of Google Chrome.
In early March, Google released a new stable version of Chrome 10 that included a 66 percent improvement in JavaScript performance via its V8 benchmark and extended Google's sandboxing technology to the integrated Flash Player in Chrome.