Googles efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Googles own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.

By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Googles engineers were able to place the Adobe plug-in in a sandbox as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself.

With this release of Chrome 23, Flash Player is now fully sandboxed in Chrome on all of our desktop platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, said Scott Hess, a Google software engineer, in a Tuesday blog post.

Linux users got their stronger browser in June with Chrome 20.

Chrome OS has had the PPAPI plug-in and sandbox for more than a year.

Chrome was the first to sandbox Flash Player: Google shipped a stable build of the browser in March 2011 with a Windows sandbox for Flash using the older NPAPI plug-in technology.

The maker of Flash issued a sandboxed plug-in for Mozillas Firefox last May, and has worked with Microsoft to integrate Flash with Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on Windows 8 and Windows RT.

According to Web metrics company Net Applications, Chrome accounted for 18.6 of the worlds browsers used in October, putting it in third place behind IE and Firefox.

Rival measurement company StatCounter, however, has long had a much different take on Chrome.

Last month, it put Googles share at 34.8, making it the worlds most-used browser.

The two companies wildly-different estimates stem from their divergent methodologies: Net Applications counts unique users while StatCounter tracks page views.

Google has been bundling Flash with its Chrome browser for more than two years, one way it has tried to stifle attacks of the frequently-vulnerable software.

Chrome 23 also introduced the Do Not Track (DNT) privacy feature; Google was the last major browser maker to add DNT support.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld.

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