First-order effects

• Windows users on Chrome's developer channel get exploit protection immediately: malicious code delivered through Flash Player is now confined by the sandbox instead of running with full browser privileges.
• Adobe gains a concrete security talking point against the narrative building around Flash's flaws — battery drain on Apple hardware and weak tablet performance — at no cost of its own engineering.

Second-order effects

• Rival browser makers face pressure to match Chrome's plugin-containment approach, since leaving Flash unsandboxed becomes a visible security gap rather than a neutral design choice.
• Attack economics shift toward whatever plugins remain outside sandboxes, pushing the exploit market — and defenders' attention — toward less-hardened browser components.

Third-order effects

• If plugin sandboxing becomes table stakes, the long-run structure of the web points toward browsers as security boundaries that assume all embedded code is hostile, with plugin vendors' relevance increasingly set by how well their runtime survives containment.
• The pattern reinforces the broader contest Adobe's CEO described between device/software makers over who controls applications on consumer devices — with security architecture, not just developer relations, becoming a battleground.