Chrome's New Update Makes Your Web Surfing Faster and Safer

Online shopping—especially when using saved personal and credit card information—makes it really easy for credit card fraudsters and identity thieves to get their hands on your sensitive info. With a new update, Google Chrome is hoping to put your mind more at ease by alerting you when the website asking for your payment information is unsecure.

According to Engadget, Chrome will now display a red “not secure” warning message in the browser’s address bar when an unsecure page—which Google defines as any site that does not have an HTTPS designation—prompts you to enter your info. This update is a visual reminder that you should only give personal info to sites that begin with HTTPS , which is more secure than the common HTTP.

A second Chrome update (version 56), announced on January 26, makes it so your web pages refresh faster. There are usually two reasons you would refresh a web page, Google software engineer Takashi Toyoshima wrote on the Chromium Blog. One is because a page is unresponsive, and the second is because you want to see fresh content on the page. While the new update addresses both concerns, it was created with the second in mind.

Here's how it works: Every time you visit a webpage, Chrome launches hundreds of network requests to connect your browser to the website’s servers. And when you reload or refresh the site, this process of requesting access starts over again (this process is called "validation"). With the new update, Chrome only validates the main resource and data that it believes may have been changed or updated between visits. Therefore, you can see fresh information without revalidating the entire page.

According to Facebook, which has a vested interest in its webpages refreshing faster, the new Chrome update allows Facebook pages to refresh 28 percent faster than before. Happy browsing!