One Small Step for Flash, One Decently-Sized Leap for Chrome

Chrome has been making strides over the past few months to increase its footprint on Windows computers across the world. Adobe Flash has been heading in the opposite direction as increasing pressure from tech giants such as Apple and Google have put them on the losing end of “what not to put on your website if you want it to work well now and in the future.”

With security as a primary concern regarding Flash and its vulnerabilities with hidden malicious code, the roll out of a sandbox for Adobe Flash Player on Chrome is something that will benefit them to a small extent and should add fuel to the growing adoption of Chrome as a default browser.

“Since this past March, we’ve been working closely with Adobe to allow Flash Player to take advantage of new sandboxing technology in Chrome, extending the work we’ve already done with sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution. This week, we’re excited to roll out the initial Flash Player sandbox for our dev channel users on Windows XP, Vista and 7.”

Those who are still holding on to Windows XP will see the biggest benefit as Chrome will be the only browser on the XP platform that runs Flash Player in a sandbox. By modifying Chrome’s existing sandbox technology currently used for HTML and Javascript, Flash sandboxing will reduce malware risks.

Those on the dev channel for Windows will get the initial taste of the new technology or they can disable it in their Chrome dev experience by adding –disable-flash-sandbox to the command line.