Go to website and it auto-asks “did you mean to go to:XXXXXX” in a cascade of boxes.
Steps: Browser literally started this shit while idle. Went to vive.com and every fucking page its asking me “did you mean to go to live.com” for URLS that dont even exist on live.com
Actual Result (gifs and screenshots are welcome!):
This is a bug and should not happen. All autocomplete and autosuggest options are disabled.
Now it wont go away. Never happened before
win7 x64 brave 7 x64 - Version 0.61.52 Chromium: 73.0.3683.86 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Super lame. I disabled all extensions. Closed all tabs. Restarted browser and computer. Now this is a “feature” it seems.
@jollyzilla,
Sending you so many notifications that it takes up your whole screen doesn’t seem like a very useful feature does it? It’s most certainly a bug. This is the way the site loads for me on macOS using latest release:
I will test this on my windows machine and see if I get the same results.
Thanks not sure whats going on with this aspect of the browser, but I kinda love the privacy of brave browser and transparency of the search. This is kinda a blow to both. Like is it logging and autosearching every URL I use? Is that being recorded someplace? I dunno, but I hope the answer is no to both of those questions.
@jollyzilla,
No.
This is a chromium feature that we inherited that seems to be enabled for some reason where it wasn’t before.
The purpose of this feature is to ensure that you are visiting the site that you truly intend to visit. In you’re example, it’s likely that many people intending to go to “live.com” may have wound up on “vive.com”. Malware and phishing website will take advantage of small errors like this and build entire [fake] domains around the misspelled site.
Still unclear why it just now started appearing – still digging into that. Thank you for your patience.
Okay I guess the question is then, can it be disabled? I assume it is checking the URL against a web service, is that correct? If so is that a Google web service.
I ask because I have monitored a few recent releases of chrome from my sophos xg and noticed interesting behavior that appears to be such, even when disabled and running ad blockers. Of course an ad blocker wouldn’t stop a browser
Turns out there actually is a way to disable it. After some digging, I found a flag that controls this behavior. To disable these suggestions:
- Launch Brave and type
brave://flags into the address bar
- Search for a flag called
Navigation suggestions for look-alike URLs
- Set this flag to
Disabled
- Relaunch the browser when prompted.
You should no longer see these suggestions once this flag is disabled. Let me know if this resolves your issue.
This did resolve the issue. I would suggest Brave provice a way to disable this in privacy settings, as having every URL you search bounced off a webservice to check for lookalikes is not privacy focused. Yes I know malware issues and such but at least give the end user notification about this behavior and an option to disable it.
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Agreed. This is likely why you haven’t seen it up until this point – nether have I. I imagine that the flag’s default state had been changed in a recent chromium update. I’ve forwarded all this information to the devs so that they can get this addressed.
To elaborate on this point a bit more here is a google security manager explaining how google will “help save us all from malformed domains”
Serious security concern here it seems. An idea spawned from the Site Engagement Score “save users from evil” concept.
This seems like the logical way for Google to collect data since the rise of privacy based blockers and browsers.
Looking forward to more info on this topic.
BTW, the multiple alerts I had may be due to me blocking some urls recently that I had seen in connection with mysterious requests. Unsure on that, but if it fails checking I wonder if it spawns UI elements. That is conspiracy at this point but I will dig more.
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We have officially filed this issue and will discuss next steps for addressing it internally. We again appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
