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> This argument is ridiculous. Flash is native code and does not run in a sandbox. It already interacts with graphics hardware through numerous other APIs and h
by mattdw 17y ago
> This argument is ridiculous. Flash is native code and does not run in a sandbox. It already interacts with graphics hardware through numerous other APIs and has the ability to kill your system in innumerable other ways.
Actually, in Safari 4 (Intel, 64bit) each plugin runs in its own process, and it _is_ effectively sandboxed. If Flash crashes, it no longer takes down the browser, or even the tab a la Chrome; you just get a hole in the page.
- modeless 17y agoThat's not what sandboxing means. Flash is in a separate process but not sandboxed. It has full access to the local system.
- ekiru 17y agoAdobe's platform evangelist claims( http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641#comment-639881 http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641#comment-639881 ) that the reason they can't use h.264 hardware acceleration on OS X is due to restrictions on browser plugins, which implies that it does not have full access to the local system.
- wanderr 17y agoI believe it has to do specifically with how drawing to the screen happens; if that has to go through the browser, then it can't utilize hardware acceleration. One interesting test we did recently was to make a very simple flash app that draws some basic controls on the screen and scales to the window size. It also prints out the amount of memory being used by the AVM. In IE, memory usage was extremely low and was about the same regardless of the screen size. In Firefox, memory usage was higher and also almost entirely dependent on window size. To me this implies that IE is allowing Flash to interface with the video card directly, while in Firefox it's having to maintain its own frame buffer internally.