Google is giving Chrome a major security upgrade, adding real-time URL protection to its Standard Safe Browsing Mode.

URL protection is a common feature in modern web browsers, comparing URLs the user visits against a database of known malicious sites. In the case of Chrome, the browser updates the database every 30 to 60 minutes. As Google points out, however, bad actors have been working to circumvent this kind of protection by using malicious sites that are live for 10 minutes or less, meaning they don’t exist long enough to get registered in the database.

Google is addressing this threat by bringing features from the Enhanced Safe option setting to the Standard setting:

Safe Browsing’s Enhanced protection mode already stays ahead of such threats with technologies such as real-time list checks and AI-based classification of malicious URLs and web pages. We built this mode as an opt-in to give users the choice of sharing more security-related data in order to get stronger security. This mode has shown that checking lists in real time brings significant value, so we decided to bring that to the default Standard protection mode through a new API – one that doesn’t share the URLs of sites you visit with Google.

The company says it is committed to protecting user privacy, partnering with Fastly to add a privacy-preserving layer:

In order to preserve user privacy, we have partnered with Fastly, an edge cloud platform that provides content delivery, edge compute, security, and observability services, to operate an Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) privacy server between Chrome and Safe Browsing – you can learn more about Fastly’s commitment to user privacy on their Customer Trust page. With OHTTP, Safe Browsing does not see your IP address, and your Safe Browsing checks are mixed amongst those sent by other Chrome users. This means Safe Browsing cannot correlate the URL checks you send as you browse the web.

The update will be available for Chrome on the desktop, as well as iOS and Android, and should provide a significant security boost for most users.