Google Chrome - Features - Security - Plugins

Plugins

• Chrome supports plug-ins with the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), so that plug-ins (for example Adobe Flash Player) run as an unrestricted separate process outside the browser and cannot be sandboxed as tabs are. ActiveX is not supported. On March 30, 2010 Google announced that the latest development version of Chrome would bundle Adobe Flash with the browser, eliminating the need to download and install it separately. Flash would be kept up to date as part of Chrome's own updates. Java applet support is available in Chrome with Java 6 update 12 and above. Support for Java under OS X was provided by a Java Update released on May 18, 2010.
• On August 12, 2009, Google introduced a replacement for NPAPI that is more portable and more secure called Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI). The default bundled PPAPI Flash Player (or Pepper-based Flash Player) was available on Chrome OS first, then replaced the NPAPI Flash Player on Linux from Chrome version 20, on Windows from version 21 (which also reduced Flash crashes by 20%), and eventually came to OS X at version 23.