Chrome’s password safety tool will now automatically run in the background

Google’s Safety Check feature for Chrome, which, among other things, checks the internet to see if any of your saved passwords have been compromised, will now “run automatically in the background” on desktop, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The constant checks could mean that you’re alerted about a password that you should change sooner than you would have before.

Safety Check also watches for bad extensions or site permissions you need to look at, and you can act on Safety Check alerts from Chrome’s three-dot menu. In addition, Google says that Safety Check can revoke a site’s permissions if you haven’t visited it in a while.

Google also announced an upcoming feature for Chrome’s tab groups, also on desktop: Chrome will let you save tab groups so that you can use those groups across devices, which might be handy when moving between a PC at home and a laptop when traveling. Google says this feature will roll out “over the next few weeks.”

The company also teased that it will bring features powered by Gemini, its new AI model, to Chrome “early next year.” That’s not a surprise — CEO Sundar Pichai had already said Gemini would make its way to Chrome — but I’m curious to see what it means in practice all the same.