Live data from Hacker News

Photoshop’s journey to the web

web.dev

141–150 of 203 posts

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#141
post #21
post #4

A polite reminder that the (quite extraordinary) Photopea[0] is available which replicates most of Photoshop's features in the browser, and is free - with a paid ad-free option. 0. https://www.photopea.com/

...and created by 1 person. My name is Ivan Kutskir and I am the only developer of Photopea. I am 27 years old graduate of the Charles University in Prague. I live in Prague, Czech Republic, but I was born in Ukraine. https://blog.photopea.com/creating-photopea.html [Edit] Reddit AMA (3yrs ago) and HN discussion on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380

He (Ivan Kuckir) has been building this online photo editor for 7 years now, and it’s paying off. Last year (2020), he broke the line of $500,000 ARR, and it’s still growing.

https://www.lunadio.com/blog/the-story-of-a-unicorn-solo-fou...

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox isn't even playing catchup. Mozilla aborted what scant work it's done on PWA support. From the horse's mouth: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593 Chrome and its variants have already won the PWA space, not by some brilliant strategy or sinister ploy on Google's part, but by default of its competitors.

That bug is only about Single Site Browser mode (SSB), where a desktop link would open a website in a Firefox browser window with no browser controls.

The relevant information is presented in the comment section below the bug report proper. If you would like a particular post to be pointed towards, here is one reprinted and slightly edited for clarity:

——————————————————————————————

Dave Townsend [:mossop] Assignee

Comment 15 • 10 months ago

(In reply to Hexandcube from comment #12)

>I disagree, many people have been waiting for PWA support in Firefox. Removing this feature, may result in people (including me, a huge Firefox advocate) switching from Firefox, to a browser that supports PWA. I'm very disappointed.

We already don't have the feature working in any decent fashion so I'm not sure removing it will have any impact here.

>I also would like to see the results of the research, Dave was talking about.

Unfortunately I think that the research is confidential at the moment.

(In reply to joshas from comment #13)

>You should reconsider this decision. It is understandable that currently there might not be enough resources to finish full PWA support, like in competing browsers, but removing it completely will not only make all work done on it a waste of time, but also send wrong signal to some users.

>Leaving feature hidden under flag for enthusiasts to experiment on and, maybe, even submit patches that will nudge it closer to completion - that would be a bigger win, than removing feature altogether.

The signal I hope we are sending is that *PWA support is not coming to desktop Firefox anytime soon* {emphasis: mine}. At this point I don't think we would accept patches to improve the feature so I don't think leaving the code in Firefox makes any sort of sense. Speaking as the developer who spent a good deal of time writing most of the code I am frustrated to see it removed too, but it is the decision that makes sense at this time.

——————————————————————————————

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#143
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get pirated versions of CC everywhere. Adobe didn’t act like they had the benefit of their users in mind in recent years, so there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If your reason for not wanting web is "I can't pirate it anymore", I don't have a lot of sympathy for you. And it's probably not even true. With a web app like this which is mostly client side, it will probably become possible to rip it and host it on non-Adobe servers or package it up with a local web server. Especially if they offer an offline mode. I imagine pirate groups are already starting to think about buildi…

There are a lot of casual users that the business model doesn't address. If you're a pro artist then CC is just a business expense and your clients pay for it. If you're not it's really hard to justify spending that amount of money for software you use once or twice a year. Don't forget the piracy to pro pipeline either.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#144
post #4

A polite reminder that the (quite extraordinary) Photopea[0] is available which replicates most of Photoshop's features in the browser, and is free - with a paid ad-free option. 0. https://www.photopea.com/

they only share a similar name and UI/UX

it doesn't even support 10% of what Photoshop is capable of, including performance and handling of RAW files

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#145

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 feel your excitement and wish it were true. I'm even building a game to leverage this newly supported tech. The good news is that the tech works really really well and is very performant in the browser. You can do a lot of cool stuff! The bad news is that it's not the tech that is holding back web based game dev. It's the users. Market research and testing has shown that users dislike "just playing" a game in the b…

What engine are you building it with?

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#146
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really solve the issues with advertising though. I believe the main reason so many developers want their games on Steam is because of the greater attention they get rather than the distribution side of things. That said, I think the niche of casual remote party games would probably work very well here. During the height of the pandemic my friends and I started doing a lot of "remote game nights" with var…

This is it. What kills a game isn't its platform, but where and how you sell it. Sales and user eyeballs matter more than even what game engine you use. We use Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc not because we wouldn't prefer to use our own store, but because no one cares about anything else.

Chrome has over a billion potential users of a game, and the reason it's so compelling is that fun is just a click away. Local installs of a client can be a thing of the past.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#147

> Why Photoshop came to the web The entire section is a deception. The real reason is to strong arm everyone into a subscription model where you never own the software that runs on your computer. That's the real end game, not this nonsense about how easy it is to launch an application if its a URL in a browser.

It's the other way around. Photoshop is not forcing their customers, it's chasing after them, as they're already switching to Figma.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#148
post #4

A polite reminder that the (quite extraordinary) Photopea[0] is available which replicates most of Photoshop's features in the browser, and is free - with a paid ad-free option. 0. https://www.photopea.com/

The fact that Photopea is better than GIMP in so many ways (does GIMP still not have adjustment layers for non-destructive editing?), and was created by one person is a little depressing, but also inspiring at the same time.

>Better than GIMP in so many ways (does GIMP still not have adjustment layers for non-destructive editing?), and was created by one person

This makes total sense. GIMPs problem was never feature quality or quantity, it was mostly focus and coherence.

A single person brings that.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download time is the biggest setback for games in the browser in my experience.

That's why games running in browsers need a different approach to asset loading, instead of downloading everything upfront, stream the asset data directly from CDN when needed. It's nothing new, games had to deal with streaming data from slow mass storage devices throughout their entire history.

Our team is working on exactly this - an asset streaming system developers can utilize for Unreal Engine that only fetches what a players needs to see at any given moment, nothing more.

Combined with compression, you can get players into desktop-quality games in WASM in seconds on most computers.

Post reply on HN