Yesterday, two stories emerged which caught my attention, the first was saying how Dell has created a version of Firefox that runs in a sandbox, the second said how Adobe are going to sandbox Reader.

I find it interesting that this is being done for the reasons it is being done. Chrome sandboxes tabs, IIRC, to enhance performance; if something crashes it only crashes that tab, not the whole browser.
By sandboxing something like Adobe Reader, all you are doing is saying "We really can't be arsed to fix this, lets put it in a situation where it doesn't need to be fixed", isn't that like having a leaky bucket and rather than patching it just putting it into a larger bucket? It works, but it's lazy.

Is this the new lazy era of computing?* If it's a security risk shove it in a sandbox?

*The previous era being lack of memory management and consideration for CPU usage because the hardware will support anything we write

Google sandbox tabs, so that, if they die, they don't bring the whole browser down AND, if a site attempts to attack the browser and cause a buffer overflow, the attack stays in the sandbox - exactly the same as with Firefox and Adobe Reader - except that Chrome does its own sandboxing.

Security is the only real reason for sandboxing something like that - other than testing products, before releasing them.

i've been banging on about sand boxing for years, especially web/file browsers

i'm just glad that the big boys are starting too see the security light …

Yes browsers should be more secure, if sand boxing achieves that then it is clearly the way to go.

Now they just need to sandbox Windows...

I just wished the Firefox sandbox actually worked properly. When Flash crashes now, I get plugin-container.exe hanging and stopping FF dead. I can't switch tabs because it doesn't respond, although it often comes back for a second or so if you leave it long enough.