Google today announced a new feature that aims to protect users against sites hosting free downloads that promise one thing but actually behave quite differently - starting with malicious Windows executables. The new feature will be integrated with Google Chrome and will display a warning if a user attempts to download a suspected malicious executable file, Google said.

This warning will be displayed for any download URL that matches the latest list of malicious websites published by the Safe Browsing API - which Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers are also using to warn users who may attempt to visit these dangerous webpages. The new feature follows the same privacy policy currently in use by the Safe Browsing feature. For example, this feature does not enable Google to determine the URLs you are visiting.

Google plans to make this feature available to all users in the next stable release of Google Chrome.