Google Expands Chrome's Site Isolation Feature To Android Users

If Chrome for Android users visit a site where they enter passwords, Chrome will isolate that site from all the other tabs in a separate Android process, keeping the user's data safe from Spectre-like attacks, Google said today. From a report: Furthermore, Site Isolation, which has been available for desktop users since July 2018, has also been expanded for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS users, which now receive protection against more attacks than the original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Site Isolation is a Chrome security feature that Google started developing as a way to isolate each website from one another, so malicious code running on one site/tab couldn't steal data from other websites/tabs. Site Isolation was developed to act as a second layer of protection on top of Same Origin Policy (SOP), a browser feature that prevents websites from accessing each other's data. Google developed Site Isolation because browser bugs often allowed sites to jump the SOP barrier and steal user data stored in the browser, created by other sites.

Ok, but...

[BringsApples]

...I find this concerning:

When enabled, Google said it expects the Site Isolation feature to incur a 3-5% increase in memory usage.

Seems high for an additional browser window.

Re:

[TFlan91]

I don't.

The whole point of the feature is to reduce resource sharing.

Re:

[pgmrdlm]

Not trying to be a smart ass, but what would you rather have. Security, or less memory usage. I will go with security.

Re:

[BringsApples]

Complete success at not being a smart ass, thank you! you're correct, I'm just saying that 3-5% of RAM is a lot to use for a browser window that simply takes 2 strings of text.

I'm old, so 60-100MB for that seems excessive. I remember when operating systems came on (3) or (4) 1.44MB floppies.

Oh God, kids are on my lawn again, gotta go....