The Google Safe Browsing and Microsoft Defender SmartScreen settings are enabled by default in Google Chrome and Microsoft Chromium Edge browsers to protect users from malicious web sites and dangerous downloads. What happens if you turn off these settings in these browsers? All your downloads will be flagged as harmful as we noticed, Edge follows Chrome behavior in this case, but not of Classic Edge.
You may never want to turn off Google Safe browsing but you may do that to protect your privacy and if you use Classic Edge on Windows 10, you may already disabled SmartScreen to stop the prompt from annoying you. But you shouldn’t be doing that in Chromium Edge case is a point you need to remember.
Google Chrome
1. Launch Chrome, click on menu > Settings
2. Click on Advanced > Privacy and Security
3. Disable “safe browsing (protects you and your settings from dangerous Settings)” Setting
Microsoft Edge Chromium
1. Launch Microsoft Edge
2. Click on Ellipsis icon to open menu > Settings > Privacy and services,
3. Turn off “Microsoft Defender SmartScreen”.
Now try to download come application in these browsers by visiting separately and observe, while the file is downloaded, download bar shows this warning “This type of file can harm your computer. Do you want to keep this file anyway ” with Keep and Discard options.
Do note, you won’t be warned when you download Zip files and Always open files of this type not working for them in the latest version. Chrome giving more severity to exe file and doesn’t allow users to keep downloaded executable files as they have to pass more steps for that. Chromium-based Edge also exhibiting the same behavior. So never ever turn off that setting and stay safe.
Have you came across these warnings or situation before?
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Google Chrome to Automatically Block Malicious Software Downloads
