Google says Windows Chrome users get a sandboxed Flash Player

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google has revealed that last week's Windows Chrome release was the first one where it managed to incorporate Adobe Flash Player in its PPAPI sandboxing.

As Adobe moves away from developing Flash clients, Google took on the task of incorporating Flash Player in its Chrome web browser. Last week the company released the latest version of Chrome and now has revealed that this is the first Windows version to feature a PPAPI sandboxed version of Flash Player.

Justin Schuh, a software engineer at Google, explained that the previous generation of NPAPI web browser plug-ins were easy to develop but caused security vulnerabilities and made it harder to incorporate developments in the web browser.

Schuh said, "The thinness [of the NPAPI framework] allowed legacy browser and OS behaviour to bleed through and crystallize to the point that it hamstrung future improvements. As browsers add compelling features like sandboxing, GPU acceleration, and a multi-process architecture, the legacy of NPAPI severely impedes or outright prevents us from extending those improvements to any pages with plug-in content."

Schuh claimed that by removing legacy code, Google was able to reduce the number of Flash Player crashes by 20 per cent. He also cited performance improvements, as Flash content can now be hardware accelerated.

Schuh confirmed that Chrome users on Mac OS X will be getting a version of the web browser that has Flash Player integrated using its PPAPI framework, while Linux users have been enjoying the benefits since Chrome 20. µ