The motivation is that safe browsing wouldn't hook into net/ directly, which is needed to get networking out of process.
The design doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cCmfhVJHPJLNjlTj7ztmAhdYgdx1W7bN3uEHa0q5dTk/edit#heading=h.bpvmkllpqyp
The thoughts so far are (assuming PlzNavigate):
-navigations can synchronously check in the browser process before making the request to the network service
-for subresources, the renderer can race the request to the network service and to safe browsing. if the network service responds first, it blocks waiting for the safe browsing check. this is similar to how android races (in the browser process)
Comment 1 by yzshen@chromium.org
, Apr 27 2017