Chrome For Windows Gets A Stronger Flash Sandbox, Promises 20% Fewer Flash Crashes
Flash doesn’t get a lot of love these days, but it’s still ubiquitous on the web. To make displaying Flash content safer for its users, Google just announced that it is now putting the Flash Player plug-in it ships with Chrome for Windows (including the aging Windows XP) inside a new and enhanced sandbox “that’s as strong as Chrome’s native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything else available.” Besides the security advantages, Google also stresses that this change will reduce Flash crashes by about 20%. Until now, the Flash plugin on Chrome for Windows used the older Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface. Now, it is using Google’s own Pepper Plugin API. This, apparently, wasn’t an easy undertaking as it took Google and Adobe two years to complete this project. According to Google software engineer Justin Schuh, “as the web evolved, the past benefits of NPAPI became liabilities” and NPAPI now “severely impedes or outright prevents us from extending those impr...