I needed to reinstall Firefox on this computer, so I started up Chrome to download the latest version and it blocked the download as unsafe! I had to manually tell it to download anyway.
Fuck Chrome. I'm glad I only used it to download one file and went back to Firefox.
Are you using a company (work) laptop? Chance that it's a rule configured by your company's sysadmin. Chance that they configured it to block downloads for executables. Try downloading other apps to confirm.
If you have a good functioning IT dept, that laptop was fully configured to their specifications long before you got a hold of it and it certainly happens automatically.
I didn't get it from work. It's my personal machine. I just used it when I had a hybrid schedule. But I don't log in with that account because it doesn't exist anymore since I don't work there anymore.
Actually, the second time I did it on a Macbook. A separate machine. However, they are both Intel Macs, so they are older and running an older OS (Monterey). Could that be it?
I just tried to reproduce this and couldn't either. I'm also using a mac. Had to download a fresh copy of chrome since I didn't already have it on my machine and it let me download 121.0 without hiccup. I'm curious what blocked it on yours.
Your safe browsing was disabled, as another commenter said. Either you had it disabled manually, or it was momentarily down and couldn't fetch the list. Either way, it marks all downloads as unsafe just to be sure in that case.
I used it for work before I quit my job because the backend required Chrome. Believe it or not, I didn't bother to close out all the work tabs when I quit the job.