Flash sandboxing arrives in Chrome Dev Channel for Windows

Sandboxing, the process of isolation and containment of untrusted executable code, is an important tool in securing your browser, and thus your computer, against unruly malware. Google Chrome has been sandboxing HTML rendering and JavaScript execution for a while, but now they've followed through on their promise and brought sandboxing to the Flash plug-in. Not only can Chrome sandbox the built-in Flash plug-in, but also the standalone Adobe version too -- so no matter whether you're running the latest Flash beta, or the automatically-updated Chrome one, you can browse a little bit safer.

Sandboxing in Chrome is currently only available for Windows, where it's particularly important for the relatively insecure Windows XP, and is rolling out to all Chrome Dev installations on Windows automatically. If you have a particular aversion to sandboxing your Flash experience, you can easily disable it with the flag --disable-flash-sandbox. For those of you who are running the beta or stable release of Chrome, but want to try out the developer version with Flash sandboxing for Windows, then head on over to Chromium.org and grab yourself the 'Dev channel' and install it over the top of your current Chrome version.

[Or grab a nightly build, as they don't interfere with your current installation! -Ed]

Tags: adobe, apps, browser, browsers, Chrome, Flash, google, google chrome, GoogleChrome, security, windows