If you’ve ever reached a site you’re not intended to by typing typo for site URL (these are called typosquatting sites and sometimes in extreme cases these act as Phishing sites as well to steal information from you) and expected the browser to offer a way to navigate to right website? Google is going to do exactly that for Chrome browser.
Currently, the Chromium developers testing a feature, which when released to the public, warns when users reach a website with lookalike URL by mistake by offering a suggestion. For instance if you visit foogle.com, Chrome alerts you with “Did you mean to go to foogle.com” info bar, clicking it will take you to correct website.
Currently, the company offers the suggestions for top 500 domains and excludes offering suggestions for short hostnames, for instance, abc.com and sites that show net error pages when landed.
The bug “Show lookalike URL suggestions for approximate matches” discovered by us first, offers more information on how new security feature will work behind the scenes. We’re able to find bug after knowing “Navigation suggestion for lookalike URLs’ flag exists in Canary 74 and in Chrome 70 before (via ZDNet).
The flag offers this description: “Enable Navigation suggestions for URLs that are visually similar to popular domains or to domains with a site engagement score”.
To test the feature right now in Chrome browser
- Ensure you’re using latest Chrome Canary
- Visit about:flags or chrome://flags/#enable-lookalike-URL-navigation-suggestions
- And select ‘Enabled’ for Navigation suggestion for lookalike URLs flag
- Restart browser.
Try to intentionally visit a top website by typing URL wrong to see if Chrome offers the suggestion to navigate to the correct website.
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