2 ms·

Does anybody know why Chrome and Edge would silently unilaterally download binary code like that?

• Klathmon 11y ago
  Well it's not silent (at least in chrome). it does show that it is downloaded, but it doesn't do anything to prevent this. IMO a good solution is to make the user manually re-confirm that they meant to download a .dll file on windows to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
  • kevingadd 11y ago
    IIRC Chrome will begin downloading an EXE in the background while the prompt is open, so you don't even lose time to the confirmation window.
• kevingadd 11y ago
  The common use cases - downloading zip files, photographs, mp3s - tend to reward this behavior, because it lets a user casually just click on a bunch of download links and accumulate them in the Downloads folder. They never have to click on any spooky dialog boxes. Ideally 'dll' and 'exe' would be blacklisted from this...
• dgoldstein0 11y ago
  obviously it's sketchy for binaries / dlls / etc., but confirmation dialogs do kindof suck. Obvious use case: makes it fast to download a lot of files. Though I've never had a need to download multiple exe / msi / dlls at once, so I wouldn't really mind a warning on those downloads. But the OS already does warn for exes from the internet, which makes it a little redundant.