Chrome 21, which launched July 31, completed efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Google's own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.

By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Google's engineers were able to stuff the Adobe plug-in into a "sandbox" as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself.

"Windows Flash is now inside a sandbox that's as strong as Chrome's native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything else available," Justin Schuh, a Chrome engineer, in a post to the Wednesday.

A sandbox is an anti-exploit technology that isolates processes on the computer, preventing or at least hindering malware from letting hackers exploit an unpatched vulnerability, escalate privileges and push their attack code onto the machine.

Chrome was the first to sandbox Flash Player: Google shipped a "stable" build of the browser in March 2011 with . In May 2012, Adobe issued a , although the open-source browser maker has struggled to diagnose a higher-than-usual number of Flash crashes since then.