One of the most frustrating parts of working on PC is when your PC slows down its speed due to some software issue. Well, if recently, you faced a similar situation on your Windows PC, it wasn’t any software issue but Google Chrome scanning your PC due to a bug.
Yes, it was last year that Google introduced some anti-virus properties to Chrome, which scans the entire download history of the user upon startup. This was revealed in a report published by Engadget recently.
The report talked about a recent incident that occurred when Kelly Shortridge detected some unexpected behavior in her PC. This kind of system issue wasn’t expected with windows, however, later it was known that it was Google and the anti-virus capabilities added to Chrome.
I was wondering why my Canarytoken (a file folder) was triggering & discovered the culprit was chrome.exe. Turns out @googlechrome quietly began performing AV scans on Windows devices last fall. Wtf m8? This isn’t a system dir, either, it’s in \Documents\ pic.twitter.com/IQZPSVpkz7
— Kelly Shortridge (@swagitda_) 29 March 2018
This feature was added by Google in order to enhance the browser and the chrome cleanup tool, which can be helpful to reset hijacked settings.
It was after the incident Justin Schuh, the Google Chrome security lead spoke about the feature and its working. He pointed out the remedy for the users,
“If you are hitting this issue and you want a fix right now then go to chrome://downloads in your browser, go to the menu in the top right, and select Clear All. That will clear Chrome’s list of downloaded files so that it won’t have any files to existence-check at startup. If you have a large list of downloaded files then this will improve startup time slightly.”
Indeed the solution is simple, yet the not every user would prefer to clear the entire download history from the browser, all because of a single possibility of a bug.
It is reported that the security team is working on updating the issue without the download history deletion, however, for now the user will have to delete the entire download history so that their system does not slow down.
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