According to a recent Twitter post from Nasko Oskov and a subsequent response from Googler Justin Schuh, Google’s Chrome Browser may be getting a security boost soon with site isolation enabled by default. The tweet itself is intended to get as many people examining the feature for “functional bugs” before release so that the transition goes smoothly. That’s because its currently in testing in Google’s Chrome Beta program. The more commonly-used stable variation of Chrome is planned for release, according to Schuh, with Chrome version 67. That should mean the wait time won’t be too long since Chrome 65 has long-since finished rolling out to all platforms.
Site isolation has been available as an option in beta for quite some time and as experimental features – thanks to Spectre and Meltdown – so it doesn’t need a weighty explanation. However, for those who may not already know, it does have a few implications for end-users of the search giant’s widely popular browser. Effectively, site isolation prevents tabs in a browser from collecting data from other open tabs. It accomplishes that by isolating tabs to their own processes in memory. In its current iteration, all associated tabs are isolated together, but that will change with the larger rollout to Chrome 67 to increase security further. At the same time, that also means that, according to Google, a device’s memory will be more taxed at around 10 to 20-percent. That’s a big jump in resource consumption, so whether or not its worth it will depend on how valuable a user believes their internet security is.
In the meantime, Schuh also hinted that the feature will be coming to Android next. In fact, the Googler says that planning for Android implementation will begin as soon as the finer details of rolling it out for other devices are finalized. That’s both good and bad news for users of the world’s most popular mobile OS for the same reasons listed above. However, there’s a good chance that the planning will include optimizations research for low-spec devices as well – falling in line with the company’s recent “Go” variations of its apps. So users shouldn’t need to worry too much that the improvement will make their budget or mid-range handset unusable.
