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This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use. (Photo: PCMag)In a new blog post, Google says its going to be bringing new features to Chrome via on device machine learning (ML). The goal is to improve the browsing experience, and to do so its adding several new ML models that will focus on different tasks. Googles says itll begin addressing how web notifications are handled, and that it also has ideas for an adaptive tool bar. These new features will lead to a safer, more accessible and more personalized browsing experience according to Google. Also, since the models run (and stay) on your device instead of in the cloud, its theoretically better for your privacy.

First theres web notifications, which we take to mean this kind of stuff. Things like sign up for our newsletter, for example. Google says these are update from sites you care about, but adds that too many of them are a nuisance. It says in an upcoming version of Chrome, the on-device ML will examine how you interact with notifications. If it finds you are denying permission to certain types of notification requests, it will silence similar ones in the future. If a notification is silenced automatically, Chrome will still add a notification for it, shown below. This would seemingly allow you to override Googles prediction.

Google also wants Chrome to change what the tool bar does based on your past behavior. For example, it says some people like to use voice search in the morning on their train commute (this person sounds annoying). Other people routinely share links. In both of these situations, Chrome would anticipate your needs and add either a microphone button or share icon in the tool bar, making the process easier. Youll be able to customize it manually as well. The screenshots provided note theyre from Chrome on Android. Its unclear if this functionality will appear on other platforms.

In addition to these new features, Google is also touting the work machine learning is already doing for Chrome users. For example, when you arrive at a web page its scanned and compared to a database of known phishing/malicious sites. If theres a match it gives you a warning, and youve probably seen this once or twice already. Its a full-page, all-red page block, so youd know it if youve seen it. Google says it rolled out new ML models in March of this year that increased the number of malicious sites it could detect by 2.5X.

Google doesnt specify when these new features will launch, nor does it say if they will be mobile-only. All we know is the silence notifications will appear in the next release of Chrome. According to our browser, version 102 is the current one. For the adaptive tool bar, it says that will arrive in the near future. Its also unclear if running these models on-device will incur some type of performance hit.

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Google to Make Chrome 'More Helpful' With New Machine Learning Additions - ExtremeTech