Chrome’s Safety Check feature will soon tell you if your browser extensions are compromised

Starting with Chrome 117, Google’s Safety Check feature will flag extensions that are no longer safe for you to keep installed. Here’s how it works – Chrome will proactively highlight extensions that have been unpublished by the developer, have been taken down for violating the Chrome Web Store policy, or that were flagged as malware.

This straightforward and frankly, long overdue feature is designed to retroactively protect you from extensions you may have installed without knowledge of their shady practices, or that went rogue after the fact.

In the ‘Privacy and security’ section of Chrome’s settings, a persistent notification will appear for extensions of concern, and removing them will allow this to be cleared from view. As per that ‘Seal of approval‘ Google implemented on the Web Store last year, developers will get time to address or appeal their own warnings before you’re even warned in Chrome and before said notification will even appear for you.

Simply by clicking the ‘Review’ button shown in the section above, you’ll be brought to your Chrome Extensions page where those offending will be highlighted and separated out from the pack so you can address them or nuke them entirely!

Google is adding a lot of common sense features this year across many of its services, but what do you think is missing? Let me know in the comments if some feature or privacy tool is still nowhere to be found, but that you think would make a great addition to your day-to-day experience. I’m personally still waiting for Tab Groups Save to be fixed, because it’s completely borked right now.