Flash Gets More Secure In Mavericks For Safari Users

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The trouble with the App Store isn't anything to do with the quality of apps; it's how many of the good ones tend to get buried.
The trouble with the App Store isn't anything to do with the quality of apps; it's how many of the good ones tend to get buried.

For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.

In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.

Writing on the company’s Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team (ASSET) blog, Adobe explains that Apple’s App Sandbox feature in Mavericks lets Adobe limit what files Flash can read or write to, or what assets on the operating system Flash Player can access. Flash also can no longer access local connections to device records and IPC channels, and network privileges are also limited, which stops Flash from talking to external servers.

To a certain extent, Flash is already sandboxed on Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but with OS X Mavericks, Safari users will benefit from the added security protections of App Sandboxing.

As for the battery life drain of Flash? Mavericks should be able to help with that too. It’s incredible at boosting battery life.

Source: Adobe

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