SAN FRANCISCO – By adding new compartmentalization technology, Google’s Chromebrowser has taken a step to keep websites from stealing sensitive data.

Since Google first released it publicly in 2008, Chrome has divided work among multiple computing processes. That approach helps keep one tab’s work from interfering with what’s happening in another. Google has been testing a stricter variation of this sort of partitioning to protect against Spectre, a new type of attack that Google and other researchers revealed in January.

Google released the new security feature, called site isolation, to a limited number of Chrome users starting with the Chrome 67 release in May. Now it’s “enabled for 99 percent of users on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS,” Chrome team member Charlie Reis said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The move shows just how complicated Spectre and the related Meltdown attacks are to thwart. Tech companies that make processors, operating systems and browsers all scrambled to block attackers from using the vulnerabilities to snatch sensitive data like passwords or encryption keys. The problem is severe enough to have risen to the US Congress, where senators griped on Wednesday that they hadn’t heard about Spectre sooner.

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