Adobe releases beta version of sandboxed Flash for Firefox

Adobe has released a new version of Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator aimed towards developers using Firefox with Windows 7 and Vista. This preview release is designed for evaluation purposes only and Adobe does not recommended that this release be used on production systems or for any mission-critical work. For this reason, we have decided not to post it here on Majorgeeks, however you can get more details at the Adobe Labs page or download it here directly as long as it is available.

Here is what Peleus Uhley from Adobe Labs has to say:

“Today, Adobe has launched a public beta of our new Flash Player sandbox (aka “Protected Mode”) for the Firefox browser. The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach. Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities. The sandboxed process is restricted with the same job limits and privilege restrictions as the Adobe Reader Protected Mode implementation. Adobe Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox 4.0 or later will be supported on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. We would like to thank the Mozilla team for assisting us with some of the more challenging browser integration bugs. For Flash Player, this is the next evolutionary step in protecting our customers.

Sandboxing technology has proven very effective in protecting users by increasing the cost and complexity of authoring effective exploits. For example, since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X. We hope to see similar results with the Flash Player sandbox for Firefox once the final version is released later this year. In the meantime, please help us get these protections out to end-users as fast as possible by volunteering to download our beta and help test. Information on known bugs, configuration options and other information can be found on Adobe Labs in the “Getting Started” section.”

If you do like testing beta releases then a beta release (11.2.202.197 Beta 5) does exist for all browsers that was last updated on February 1st, 2012 and it is available for download at Majorgeeks.