Adobe announced good news for Firefox users yesterday through its Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team (ASSET) blog. The post announces that Adobe has launched a public beta of a new Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox. Much like the Protected Mode in Adobe Reader X, this will hopefully lead to fewer exploits able to impact a computer.
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 will require Firefox 4.0 or later and Windows Vista or Windows 7.
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.
The final version will be shipping later this year. You can download the beta and read more about the preview release from Adobe Labs.