Adobe has posted the following information on its blog: "We have 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.

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.

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."