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Photoshop’s journey to the web

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Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#101
post #25
post #13

Only Chromium/Blink browsers are supported, so no Firefox or Safari. This is bad for the web.

Two very underfunded teams there trying to play catch up. Only one of them has an excuse though, the other is literally the most profitable company in the world who is strategically trying to make the web into a subpar platform for their own commercial interests.

Half a billion/year from Google is hardly underfunded. Maybe if they used this money better they wouldn't have to kick 250 engineers last year.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#102

Really interesting how the browser is becoming the universal OS. It sort of gives more power/control to Google and reduces it from Apple and Microsoft. Would love to be in the executive meetings where they discuss the implications of this.

Really interesting how the browser is becoming the universal OS

Firefox spent 2011-2016 creating a browser-based operating system called FirefoxOS (for smartphones). I used to think it was a terrible idea and a waste of Mozilla's resources. Now I wonder if I was wrong, and perhaps it was a good idea - but simply too early and too immature?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something to be worried about? I also see more and more things in the field of geography , especially data visualisation, to start living in browsers and most people default to Chrome.

Yes, it is something to worry about. It's wresting control away from users via their no longer able to run native applications. And it's only going to continue with the continuing new generation of programmers who know nothing but JavaScript continue to implement everything in JavaScript because they've never known a world that doesn't have JavaScript.

Native applications already have subscription models so I don’t get this.

And are mobile apps running in locked down OSes truly “native” either? Whether they’re written in WASM or Swift, if they are locked behind an App Store subscription, whether they’re downloaded and stored on the device filesystem permanently or downloaded on the fly and cached as needed is irrelevant as the end user still lacks control and you still end up with an uncrackable walled garden.

There some bizarre notions associated with “native” here which I don’t think have anything to do with control over how people run stuff.

Likewise, why is a world where most people learn JavaScript any better or worse than a world where most people learn Swift?

There’s never going to be a world where no minority languages exist and frankly, the more “pro” languages which have fewer users end up paying more $$$ as they are perceived to require more expertise than scripting languages. Seems like a win/win if concerned.

We once celebrated the Web and the idea of ephemerality, portability, “view source” and inspect, etc and now somehow we’re back to people wanting installable binary blobs locked into app stores as somehow superior.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#105

WebAssembly is coming for games next. Near native performance, players can join with just a link, and no 30% cut that developers have to deal with.

I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy. It is extremely difficult to develop high-quality games for a console, which has fixed hardware specs and a single vendor for the SDK. Any layer of emulation on top of that creates new problems and dilutes every single aspect of performance, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

On top of that, building things that work consistently across browsers and across time is an extremely cursed problem.

Insomniac Games, makers of the new Spider-Man games, spent several years trying to port all of their development tools and workflows to be web-based and work in Chrome. And then, when they got there, it turned out to be terrible. Google would update the browser and key tools would break and nobody would know why. The tools folks had to work in Javascript, while the majority of the engine was still in C++.

The call was eventually made to migrate the tools back to native exes, which was another multi-year process, but nobody missed the Chrome tools. Clicking a bookmark in a browser turns out to be about as difficult as clicking a desktop icon, and the stability is significantly improved.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#107
post #19

I can see Illustrator and Photoshop running on a browser but I doubt we'll see After Effects and Premiere on WASM any time soon. IMO the solution will probably be a combination of browser based UI and cloud based processing. The drawback of this approach is that the server would need to host the project files.

Even for pro photographers, i doubt my 250Mb RAW images and 2-4Gb PSD files would be great to edit on the web...

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat tangential, but if people are looking for an After Effects / Premiere alternative, I highly recommend Davinci Resolve. I can only really speak to the editing, but it seems leaps ahead of premier in a lot of ways. Very quick for scrubbing through 4k footage (even the free version) and far more intelligence when it comes to certain jobs (eg throw a folder of RAW photos in there to make a hyperlapse and it'll r…

Second the recommendation for Resolve, just be aware it's the gateway drug to an expensive BlackMagic hardware habit.

For anybody thinking of getting the Davinci Resolve Studio (full version), you can buy the hardware editor (Davinci Resolve Speed Editor) and get Studio for free. The hardware is the same price as buying Studio on its own so it seems a no-brainer.
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