Microsoft tests Chrome extension that opens suspicious sites in Edge sandbox

Microsoft has released its Windows Defender Application Guard as a browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as a test. The extension causes suspicious sites to open in a protected Edge container.

The extension is intended for enterprise environments and checks URLs that users of Chrome and Firefox want to access against whitelists that can be set up by the administrators. If a site isn’t on the list, Edge opens to display the page in a protected container.

Within that Edge environment, the user can freely navigate and access sites. As soon as the user wants to open a page that is on the list of trusted URLs, Chrome or Firefox will open it again, Microsoft reports with the announcement.

Windows Defender Application Guard is part of build version 1803 of Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Professional. It enables Internet sessions completely isolated from the rest of the system and network in a Hyper-V container. Initially, Windows Insiders test users can try out the extension. Wide availability will follow later.