Chrome Adds Warning For Extensions That Take Over Your Proxy Settings (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "Google engineers have added two new features to the Chrome browser that will alert users of extensions that hijack proxy settings or the new tab page," reports Bleeping Computer. Google has been testing these two techniques sparingly with a small subset of users for more than a year, but they have now landed in Google Canary. The techniques are used by malicious Chrome extensions to hijack traffic and insert ads, or to redirect search traffic to affiliate search engine programs. The addition of these popup alerts are part of Google's plan to fight malicious Chrome extensions that have been starting to plague the Web Store.

Comments

Why?

[Frosty Piss]

Chrome Adds Warning For Extensions That Take Over Your Proxy Settings...

Why does Chrome allow extensions that can hijack proxy settings?

Re:Why?

[Sigma 7]

Why does Chrome allow extensions that can hijack proxy settings?

The use case is an extension that changes proxy settings. For example, if you need/want to visit a specific website for a proxy server (such as 127.0.0.1:8080, to cache/save websites as you browse them), you can enable or disable it at a click of a button.

Of course, a better question asks why extensions have better access to the browser settings than the user. Editing proxy settings manually has to be done on the OS level, while extensions can tell Chrome to use a given proxy through an API.