Google’s Safe Browsing anti-malware software looks after over 3 billion devices

You might or might not know about Google’s phishing prevention tool. If you haven’t seen it work for you, then it means it’s doing its job. The search giant announced that the Safe Browsing program for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox has protected over a billion more smartphones, desktops, and laptops compared to last year. Safe Browsing is also enabled for popular social media app Snapchat. How do you know Safe Browsing is working for you? You’ll get the big red warning page.

The tool was created a decade ago for personal computers but has seen growth with more mobile devices out on the market. "Over the last few years, we've rethought how Safe Browsing delivers data," Google's Stephan Somogyi and Allison Miller wrote in a blog post. "We built new technologies to make its data as compact as possible: We only send the information that's most protective to a given device, and we make sure this data is compressed as tightly as possible."