Chrome, the most widely used browser on the planet, has recently been updated to detect phishing attacks much faster -- 50 times faster, according to Google's own tests.

It's easy to take for granted the browser's internal structure and how it keeps you safe while surfing the vast web. Even if you avoid the most dubious corners of cyberspace, you can still be exposed to a variety of threats.

Phishing is cited as one of the biggest dangers, perhaps because it relies on would-be victims willingly providing sensitive information without compromising their systems; according to the FBI's latest Internet Crime Report (PDF), phishing is the most prominent threat to victims in victims, and was the most prominent type of cybercrime in 2020 in terms of number of victims.

That's where browsers come in handy, and it partially boils down to image processing.

"Each time you navigate to a new page, Chrome evaluates a collection of signals about that page to see if they match those of the phishing site. To do so, it compares the color profile (range and frequency of colors present on the page) of the page you visit to the color profile of a typical page," Google explains.

According to Google, this can be CPU-intensive because each pixel must be evaluated individually, and some displays may have more than 14 million pixels.

"Chrome can now perform image-based phishing classification up to 50 times faster at the 50th percentile and 2.5 times faster at the 99th percentile. On average, users can get phishing classification results in 100 milliseconds instead of 1.8 seconds," Google said.

According to Google, the reduction in CPU time for these tasks equates to 1.2%. This also means "less battery drain and less fan spinning time," which is probably not super important. Still, even minor performance gains are welcome and could add up over time.

The latest version of Chrome also improves site isolation security. This means that sites are handled separately to prevent malicious actors from accessing data they should not see; Chrome's site isolation feature now covers a "wider range of sites" and extensions.

Chrome should eventually update on its own, but if you want to force an update, click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner and go to Help > About Google Chrome.