Photoshop’s journey to the web

https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/

by feross • 5 years ago

179 193 5 years ago

web.dev

Tajnymag• 5 years ago

Does that mean Photoshop is finally going to be supported on Linux?

0x4a42• 5 years ago

It looks like it will.

ISL• 5 years ago

Perhaps in a sense, but not in the sense that one can run it without an internet connection many years in the future.

vnglst2• 5 years ago

Really cool to see what's possible in desktop browsers these days. Photoshop coming to our browsers is a huge achievement and milestone.

But it also makes me kinda sad that none of the mentioned examples properly work on mobile. If even big web companies can't pull that off, is it impossible? (Mainly thinking about Gmail and Google Docs here). Or have we given up on web applications on mobile?

djxfade• 5 years ago

Its not impossible. I think the biggest issue is that many of these ported web apps don't use the DOM for their UI. This makes it a much more difficult task creating responsive UI.

bobajeff• 5 years ago

Except, according to the post, Photoshop uses Web Components for the UI.

I'm guessing the actual reason if that most desktop apps aren't designed with expectations that a mobile app has.

mhoad7• 5 years ago

I’m fairly certain the reason that is currently not officially a thing is due to Safari on iOS missing a huge chunk of features that would have made that possible. They spent over a decade by this point intentionally underfunding that team while maintaining a browser monopoly on their platform under the guise of “security”.

That seems like it’s very slowly starting to change perhaps.

vnglst2• 5 years ago

Google could have made Gmail to work on Chrome (just on Android) as a show case what would be possible on a good browser. It's true that Safari is lagging behind in features, but I don't believe it's the only reason.

dylan604• 5 years ago

I'd assume that Gapps wanted native for the same reason FB did: more access to details on the device directly

wgx• 5 years ago

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/

andai2• 5 years ago

I wonder if this was what spurred it! A few years ago a free fan operated RuneScape server running an old version became more popular than the actual game. Jagex asked them to shut down, but they also launched their own version in kind: OldSchool RuneScape.

throwaway889900• 5 years ago

Moparscape was always running even before that, albeit not as polished and the server owners had full control over how ridiculous the game was.

al3xandre• 5 years ago

How have I never heard about his before. This is amazingly useful.

achow2• 5 years ago

...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

arthur_sav• 5 years ago

If i remember correctly, the whole app runs in the browser without a backend which is pretty amazing.

achow2• 5 years ago

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...

dperfect2• 5 years ago

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.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Yes, GIMP layers are still in limited and a pain to use. I'll definitely try photopea next time.

coldtea5• 5 years ago

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.

avian• 5 years ago

You know what's more than little depressing? That each time any similar topic comes up you don't have to scroll down very far to find someone in the comments that will bash GIMP for some random thing.

You're comparing an ad-supported/subscription web service making a good part of 6 figures per year with software maintained largely by volunteer work for the past 20+ years.

inDigiNeous2• 5 years ago

Nomen est Omen, with a name like GIMP what can you expect. I mean, the software name is literally slang for a disabled person.

Why don't they start from changing the name I don't understand.. Open Source projects have these odd ways of just sticking whatever somebody came up in the late 90s and rolling with that.

chrismorgan• 5 years ago

A lot of the best software is made by one person. Large codebases and organisations have significant inertia that make producing good stuff hard. You’ll also get greater deviation from the mean in a single developer (so a lot of the worst software is also made by one person).

toastercat• 5 years ago

Yep, I use this all the time when I need to do some quick image editing. I tried to get used to Krita, but PhotoShops hotkeys and menus were already burned into my brain. PhotoPea does a great job emulating them.

pupppet• 5 years ago

Wow even some of Photoshop's more obscure shortcuts are the same. Embarrassing that it feels snappier than my actual copy of PS.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Wow, it even seems to work great on a phone, better than any free app I've tried.

Shadonototra2• 5 years ago

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

Jyaif2• 5 years ago

Most people use less than 10% [1] of what Photoshop is capable of. It is the subset of features that is used by 90% [2] of people that Photopea covers. That means Photopea could take 90% of the market share of Photoshop, which is pretty good return on investment!

[1][2]: Like in the parent's comments, all percentages are made up.

dang• 5 years ago

Discussed in a few past threads:

Photopea: A free alternative to Photoshop used by millions of people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898836 - April 2021 (5 comments)

AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26768550 - April 2021 (267 comments)

AMA with the Creator of Photopea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143189 - Aug 2020 (6 comments)

Reddit AMA on Photopea, a free alternative to Photoshop used by 1.5M people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380 - Nov 2018 (179 comments)

My name is Ivan and I want to make the best photo editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924402 - Dec 2017 (80 comments)

Surface Blur and Median - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612720 - Sept 2016 (34 comments)

Photo Pea 0.3 – New features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624264 - Oct 2013 (7 comments)

HTML5 image editor wants to replace Photoshop and Gimp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6396474 - Sept 2013 (4 comments)

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

polite thank you -- not sure if I checked it out in the earlier days or something but hadn't been back and stunned at how GIMPy it is (in a good way). And totally jump-right-in useable. Impressive.

kidfiji• 5 years ago

Glad to see major industry applications such as Figma and now Photoshop pave the way for Wasm adoption

detritus4• 5 years ago

Well, I certainly don't like where this is going.

Mind you, I suspect I'll not be alone and by the time Adobe transition to a fully web-based subscription lock-in, Affinity et al will be better positioned to entirely fill the void.

Sod Adobe.

pier253• 5 years ago

The lock-in has existed for years, regardless of where the app is running.

runako• 5 years ago

Reminder that many people still routinely pirate software and can generally use downloadable software without paying for it. Going to a Web-only version would eliminate the ability of people to pirate it and use it free.

orangepurple3• 5 years ago

The lock-in definitely does not exist. You just aren't aware of the jail breaks.

andai2• 5 years ago

What do you not like?

detritus4• 5 years ago

The present subscription model and the prospect of where an entirely web-based equivalent will lead.

Also, most of the people I know who use Creative Suite have absolutely zero need for any of the recent multi-user / social/web-based functionality. I've never in my twenty-plus years in design needed it and see a decreasing likelihood I would in future either.

I appreciate that ages me and marks me as an old fogey, but.. well, all for the best if competition gets to the point where I can go back to buying single releases every n years, at my leisure, again.

Sod Adobe.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

Maybe, but AI tooling is becoming relevant and if Adobe plays their cards right that will let them maintain a premium edge for another decade or two.

For sure, though, sod Adobe.

astlouis445• 5 years ago

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.

anonymousab3• 5 years ago

You only deal with the Steam or EGS or Gog cut if you're utilizing their storefront; if you are just hosting the game on your own site, then whether that game is a webassembly package or a desktop application, you don't have to pay some gatekeeper (other than your file host). Same thing with Android, though there is a bit more friction there.

flohofwoe6• 5 years ago

The "gatekeeper" in this case is Windows SmartScreen. SmartScreen will pop up a scare dialog unless the installer has enough "reputation points" by being popular or signed with an EV code signing certificate (which is a lot more expensive, and hassle to obtain and use than a regular code signing certificate). In any case, for ease of distribution nothing beats an URL which when clicked immediately starts the game.

yesco• 5 years ago

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 various different kinds of games. However since most of them rarely played games, owned macs and weren't very technically inclined, the games that had the least friction were generally the browser based ones.

Since party games by nature tend to be great at organic advertising and benefit the most from quick easy installs, I think there is a big opportunity here that not many have taken notice to yet.

softfalcon5• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, choosing to not use Steam, GoG, or similar is simply out of the question.

The reality of you selling your game at a profit without the help of one of these app storefronts is improbable. Keep in mind that even if you somehow become successful in this regard, these storefronts have a vested interested in making sure you and your technologies fail.

Edit: apologies if I seem dire, I'm actually on your side and WISH that the world was a free market without all these gatekeepers. Myself, my partner, and many of my close friends constantly battle with these "gate keepers" as game devs/designers and I wish they would go away, but the market (users) love (to use) them even when they hate them.

Elidrake24• 5 years ago

It's pretty clear you haven't worked in that industry. Per your logic, no one should have that issue now, you can sell your games on your own site without issue (in fact you can sell your own Steam keys without the 30% fee).

q_andrew• 5 years ago

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

flohofwoe6• 5 years ago

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.

skadamat2• 5 years ago

Yeah there's lots of alternatives to the app stores for windows games. You can also just sell direct to consumer.

The real challenge with webassembly as it applies to games (at least large ones) is the asset size. AA - AAA games are 20-100 GB and that can't just live in browser cache.

Also, to be honest building a complex game and shipping it to the web is kinda crap shoot for other reasons. Games are power hungry, and don't want to be limited by browsers. Also, a browser is a massive application that sits around consuming resources that a AAA native game could use.

But of course, I imagine games will be developed differently to take advantage of the web (smaller games, streaming in levels / textures as needed, etc).

flohofwoe6• 5 years ago

The total asset size doesn't matter much (see Google Earth which is probably backed by terabytes of data), but how much new data the game needs to present to the player per second (which means the games needs to be designed for a minspec bandwidth just like it needs to be designed for a minspec CPU and GPU).

lostinroutine• 5 years ago

How would the problem of huge (dozens of GB) graphics assets be solved? Is there a current/planned way to have the large WASM binaries and assets stored on the computer?

softfalcon5• 5 years ago

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 browser. This is particularly true in the AAA segment that webassembly and its perf gains would best serve.

Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website. Please note, random is used very loosely here to mean "any store/website that isn't Apple Store, Play Store, Xbox Live, PSN, or Steam".

I foresee that we'll need some major player with a big game like Fortnite, Roblox or Mojang to spearhead using web deployed games before we'll see anything happen in this space. The existing "install to disk and play" is working just fine and game devs don't really see any reason to change that.

The other major thing is that most "slightly" big games (even smaller mobile ones) have assets in the minimum size of 4-10 GB of data. Even if you can render the game in browser, you have to download those assets. Yes, of course you can "load only what you need" but for many many games (source: my wife is a game designer and I'm a game programmer/web dev) that still entails at least 1 GB of data that would need to be loaded and is difficult to cache client side in the browser.

kitsunesoba• 5 years ago

Market research and testing has shown that users dislike "just playing" a game in the browser. This is particularly true in the AAA segment that webassembly and its perf gains would best serve.
Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website.

No doubt this is partially thanks to the numerous game-like ads that link to exceptionally cheaply made web games. I remember a time in the late 00s and early 10s when browser based games were starting to flower, but then the spammy stuff took over and their popularity dropped like a rock.

I would hazard a guess that the overhead of navigating to a specific site and the clunkiness inherent to browsers being a 1024-in-one multitool doesn’t help matters. It’s nicer to just fire up Steam and have all your games neatly listed, all free of extraneous browser chrome and whatnot.

astlouis445• 5 years ago

What engine are you building it with?

coldtea5• 5 years ago

Players who play the high profile games that web assembly would allow you to make games for (think Fortnite, CS:GO, etc) all want to play games from a trusted download from a trusted store, not some random website.

People just don't want to invest/search for random new games on random websites.

For games people want to play, and already have heard about, it wouldn't matter if they are on a website or a "trusted store". If Fortnite was made available to play only from a website starting tomorrow nobody would have a problem using it from https://www.fortnite.com as opposed to Epic's game platform.

And for games sold by big companies, it also wouldn't matter. It's about trust (which Valve or Epic has), not about web vs a launcher/store.

If devs can get that trust, then getting users to play the game on the web is not a problem.

but for many many games (source: my wife is a game designer and I'm a game programmer/web dev) that still entails at least 1 GB of data that would need to be loaded and is difficult to cache client side in the browser.

You also need to download/cache that 1GB or 10GB if you use Valve or whatever.

As for caching it client side in the browser, you can do it as well, either as browser cache (browser vendors will just add the technologies for that), or as locally downloaded assets with direct access granted from the browser (the article already talks about using a new API for mmapping-style access to files outside the browser).

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

It's a long way from being a usable gaming interface. There's too much "convenience UI" baked into browsers that trips up gaming. Pressed the wrong button? It was a browser hotkey for history-back and you just unloaded the game. Have add-ons enabled? Whoops they are messing up the controls.

Kapura2• 5 years ago

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.

wffurr2• 5 years ago

Doesn't Nintendo sell a crapload of games written to run on a six year old mobile chip? Seems like there's a plenty large market for non-AAA games.

aspenmayer• 5 years ago

Does Electron help with this?

flohofwoe6• 5 years ago

If there's a new web game disruption it won't be started by the AAA-games industry, the AAA model depends on big platform owners like Valve, Nintendo or Sony, none of them have an interest in a distribution channel they have no control over.

coldtea5• 5 years ago

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.

Maybe we should stop caring for AAA games then? What happened to gameplay instead of "this new game has 10% more detailed graphic assets"?

pedalpete2• 5 years ago

This is the Innovators Dilemma writ large.

"The technology can never compete", but it gets better every year.

The new Microsoft Flight Simulator is amazing, and they took that same rendering and can stream it to the browser (though not as a game as far as I understand) with Project Anywhere https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/streaming-simulation-and-t...

I'm not saying that WebGL is ready to take on AAA games today, but calling it "pure fantasy" is naive. People will never use a browser on their phones, the internet will never compete with television, electric cars can't take on gasoline, the list goes on and on.

sofixa• 5 years ago

Cloud gaming also achieves this, although in quite a different way

CincinnatiMan• 5 years ago

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.

randomluck040• 5 years ago

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.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

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.

open-source-ux3• 5 years ago

Is this something to be worried about?

Yes. But it is mostly too late to doing anything. The move to the browser has been happening for years.

As an example, look at ChromesOS - a cloud operating system (OS) that tracks and records all your activity the moment you sign in. A Google account is required to use the full functionality of the OS. It is used by millions of schoolkids with all the privacy implications that entails. Somehow, Google's promise to never build profiles of their school users is enough to placate developers. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question or scrutinise the privacy implications of using a cloud OS.

Google must be gleeful they've captured a whole generation of US kids to use Google services through the ubiquity of ChromeOS in US schools. And without any dissenting views from developers on the matter either.

VikingCoder• 5 years ago

If you haven't seen "The Birth And Death of Javascript," you should watch it.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

open-source-ux3• 5 years ago

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

tadfisher• 5 years ago

WebOS and "iPhone OS 1.0" share those traits.

I understand the desire to leverage the technologies and talent we've invested into the Web, but as a platform it still reeks of its roots as a tool to display remote hypertext documents, and I would personally prefer to write "native" apps in a more tailored and coherent API and runtime environment.

chaz6• 5 years ago

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

pier253• 5 years ago

Just yesterday the Webkit team at Apple announced many open positions.

https://twitter.com/Litherum/status/1452770092308054020

mhoad7• 5 years ago

I saw this on Twitter today also… however, this is after over a decade of taking a very very different approach though mind you. I’ll believe them when we see the outcomes though.

mhoad7• 5 years ago

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.

vnorilo• 5 years ago

I'd like to support Firefox with a donation as I'm sure many others would, but I don't trust Mozilla foundation to allocate it to something that actually matters.

hbn• 5 years ago

Hey, I don't think you should discount all of the great work Apple has done on Safari lately, such as... making tabs ugly and hard to use

Dracophoenix3• 5 years ago

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.

kushan2020• 5 years ago

Seeing Firefox teams callous take on a critically important Native file system feature [1], it comes at no surprise that major products are dropping Firefox compatibility.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

slig• 5 years ago

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.

azakai2• 5 years ago

As others already mentioned, funding is just one factor here.

Mozilla decided to stop focusing on porting such applications to the Web before 2020's layoffs, when Mozilla was still growing. The decision came after some management changes, basically: I don't think any individuals changed their minds, just those people happened to leave, and their replacements had different ideas.

(I personally disagreed with the new priorities at the time, and ended up leaving.)

ZetaZero• 5 years ago

Firefox has revenues of over $400M per year. I hear they have only 40 developers working directly on FF. Do the math

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

Apple is choosing to artificially limit the potential of web image work in Safari anyway.

Safari 15 has a canvas memory limit of 4096 × 4096 pixels where Safari 14 could deal with resolutions up to 16384 x 16384.

https://twitter.com/rikschennink/status/1442443774748082185

I'm definitely not one to advocate web apps that only work in one browser, but Apple is certainly going out of their way to make lives harder for developers who do want to support their browser and we all know why that is.

azakai2• 5 years ago

That's not ideal, of course - the point of the Web is that you can visit a website from anywhere - but in practice, when this type of cutting-edge application arrives on the Web, often at least initially it doesn't run optimally in all browsers or has other limitations. That's been the case with things like Mozilla porting Unreal Engine to the Web back in the day, for example.

In general, after the initial launch things tend to improve as both browsers and applications focus on compatibility.

pier253• 5 years ago

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.

matsemann2• 5 years ago

I'd actually like that. Like running a jupyter notebook on a beefy server somewhere. Biggest issue is probably that one still needs to be able to quickly seek in the movie, and watch rendered results in correct resolution without too much delay/downloading. But that delay could in practice end up being shorter if the server is faster at rendering.

BuildTheRobots• 5 years ago

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 recognise them as a sequence and let you treat it as video).

The free version contains 90% of the features and is completely free - even for commercial use. The studio version is a one-off £250 (two seats) with free major and minor updates for life. It ran on Linux before it could even run on Windows and has just been optimised for M1 Macs.

Considering Adobe wants £238/year just for Premier (editing) or £600/year for the whole suite if I want After Effects (Resolve has "Fusion" built in for sfx, though admittedly the CS suite has far more to it than just that), for my uses it seemed like a no-brainer. And I got a free editor keyboard (£250 retail) when I bought the license.

My only annoyance is that Premier is so ubiquitous that you can need a license to be able to open projects from other editors. And that also requires you're all on the same version as the file format gets bumped every version (infuriating if you've deliberately stayed a version behind because it runs better on your older hardware). I find it quite ironic as the two big Premier users (companies) I know will do their final cut in Premier, render it and then throw it to a colourist who imports their final video into Davinci for colour grading anyway.

One of them already has plans to transition across for the edit, but as they have decades of combined experience working with Premier, it's a difficult if not dangerous decision to deliberately loose productivity whilst people retrain. If you're just starting out, especially at home or in a small team, then the idea of starting with Premier seems crazy.

jon-wood2• 5 years ago

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

okhobb• 5 years ago

There is a YC W22 company hoping to do just that: https://ozone.tech/

thegoleffect• 5 years ago

An offline-first web version of AE/Prem is what we're working on @ Vidbase. Internally, it works today better than the desktop apps imo. Others are working on similar tools as well.

lepouet• 5 years ago

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

bjano• 5 years ago

WebCodecs is available since the latest Chrome, so it is now possible to use hardware accelerated codecs from the browser. Instead of uploading & downloading GBs of data and paying for someone else's processing power, you can do everything locally as long as you don't mind a few limitations.

I am working on a project using this approach: https://vidmix.app

(still plenty of minor bugs, I was planning for a proper Show HN soon)

Also because both the preview and the rendering is done with WebGL the result is guaranteed to match what you see while editing, unlike with some cloud-based editors where a different stack on the rendering backend is trying to replicate what the browser is doing with js+css

noveltyaccount• 5 years ago

How does an app like Photoshop protect its IP when algorithms are compiled in webassembly and downloaded to the browser? Or do they hide away the secret sauce behind service calls?

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

It is not different from compiled machine code.

matsemann2• 5 years ago

Biggest difference is probably more people have the means to debug something when it runs in the browser. So technically the same, but it may be more available to look at.

Ralo3• 5 years ago

I would love to see Photoshop in browser as a self-hostable option. I have many tools setup on my LAN and slowly been porting applications over to my local server so I can access all my applications on all my devices.

yepthatsreality2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure if you’re only accessing applications through a browser in this case but if you’re using Remote Desktop then why not Gimp or similar FOSS alternative?

Ralo3• 5 years ago

Oh no, it's all in-browser apps. I use it when at work by connecting to my server through chrome and using those apps. We only have chrome access at work, in fact all port besides 80/443 are blocked.

Z_I_F_F• 5 years ago

What others tools do you have setup on your LAN? Curious of the possibilities with this

Ralo3• 5 years ago

Nothing too crazy but makes my work flow easy to swap between locations. I got VSCode server, PHPMyAdmin, Transmission (Web based torrent client), DIY Youtube downloader client, DIY video editor, A bunch of service managers, and a couple more things.

It's basically a whole developer suite with remote processing. I could do AI training on my cellphone with this setup if I wanted.

I've been working on a DIY spotify clone for a media player.

It makes it really convenient having all my files on a central server, so I'm not juggling drives, and copying over data.

As well, it's automatically backed up weekly so it's always safe.

Works well for someone always on the go :)

candiddevmike• 5 years ago

What is the best language to write web assembly in these days from a library/bundle size perspective?

EvanAnderson• 5 years ago

I'm not at all looking forward the future where "conveniences" provided by operating systems (like consistent GUI styling, preferences, accessibility, etc) are thrown by the wayside and each application effectively re-implements a GUI targeting a canvas "framebuffer".

therealdrag0• 5 years ago

The future is now.

flohofwoe6• 5 years ago

That ship has sailed for at least a decade, and DCC applications like Photoshop or Maya were the forerunners of custom UIs.

linguae• 5 years ago

That day is already here and has been around for quite a while. Even before the proliferation of Electron applications there has been a push away from UI consistency in desktop environments. I believe the reasons are a combination of the following factors:

- Easier cross-platform support easier for developers

- "Branding" concerns

- A philosophy that the app, not the operating system, is central to the user experience; one consequence is there's a strong emphasis on having that app behave as similar as possible across platforms even when the app's behavior violates the platform's UI guidelines.

I lament the decline of the idea of a native desktop with an ecosystem of conformant applications. However, I see the economic incentives for writing cross-platform applications that emphasize consistency across platforms instead of consistency with each platform's UI standards. As long as we have app-centered desktop environments, the only way I see native applications that are conformant to that platform's UI standards being promoted is through market demand. Historically Mac users have shunned software that doesn't conform to the Mac's UI guidelines, though this may be changing in recent years thanks to the rise of Electron and Catalyst.

copperx• 5 years ago

I wouldn't despair, because if the past serves as a guide, unwritten conventions will be followed by most.

zz8653• 5 years ago

As someone who is bad at JS I really hoped webassembly would let me leapfrog JS/React etc. Is it time to start using it?

orangepurple3• 5 years ago

No, layout is all CSS with some JS mixed in, and will be for a long time. Webassembly will help accelerate heavy mathematical computations such as canvas graphics.

jon-wood2• 5 years ago

You could hypothetically use Webassembly to build your entire application around a canvas and either render directly with canvas calls or WebGL, but it would somewhat miss the point of the web unless you're explicitly building a game or something.

crumpled• 5 years ago

Yes

paulgb• 5 years ago

I'd like the answer to be “yes”, but at this point if you need to ship software I'd say “no”. There are wasm counterparts to React (my favorite right now is yew.rs), but they're self-described as not production-ready. Overall, the tooling is just much more developed on the JS/React side. Unfortunately.

That said, you can get plenty of mileage out of using React as a frontend and wasm for the application core. I believe this is what Figma does. And you can sidestep the DOM entirely and use your own UI renderer, which seems to be what Adobe is doing here. https://makepad.dev/ is another (absurdly impressive) example of that approach, but that's a very involved approach!

mhoad7• 5 years ago

There are a few things already here or “coming soon” that will 100% let you leapfrog JS.

WASM still has no concept of garbage collection which means that by default it’s limited to a smallish number of languages that are viable. That’s changing in the not too distant future it seems as the plans for garbage collection are well underway already.

It also has no ability to do DOM manipulation meaning you end up in a scenario like the one in the article where “algorithms” end up in wasm and the UI in web components / JS.

I believe that too is going to change at some point.

As for where things stand RIGHT now in 2021 if you want to skip JS I would say it probably depends a lot on what you want to build. I think for a lot of B2B enterprisey apps that mostly run on Desktop devices Flutter is already a viable option there and generally a much nicer experience.

The performance / accessibility right now isn’t at a level where it would make sense for a bunch of other options but as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread it is barely out of beta by a couple of months. It’s improving a lot at a pretty rapid pace and is built upon solid tech choices and open standards. I think it has a decent future ahead of it.

zz8653• 5 years ago

Thanks I wasn't sure why wasm was mostly limited to C++/Rust right now but the memory makes sense.

Flutter is great except for Dart - another language.

_fat_santa• 5 years ago

"Oh this is cool, lets give it a try"

Goes to photoshop.adobe.com

"Alright it's loading, lets see what it looks like!"

...Redirected to a Medium article.

---

This is why nobody likes you Adobe.

orangepurple3• 5 years ago

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.

HeckFeck2• 5 years ago

I've never met anyone who couldn't grasp the idea of programs running locally on a computer. Practcially every user of Android/iOS will understand it intuitevly. Back in the day anyone of all ages and abilities I knew on 90s-2000s hardware could download and install programs. Anyone who couldn't honestly wouldn't get much benefit from a computer.

Indeed, the convenience argument is just a pretext. They long to see the back of the days when you could buy Photoshop 7.0 for a one off fee and still use it today.

Godel_unicode3• 5 years ago

I see these comments in virtually every web app thread that there is, and it's immediately clear that the people making them have never worked somewhere with a vaguely incompetent IT department (most companies). There are companies where adding a new application to the image/getting IT to install it requires forms, waiting, and sacrificing a small animal. Those people are also not paying for it and thus don't care at all how much it costs.

modeless2• 5 years ago

Adobe strong-armed everyone to the subscription model long before they supported web. There's no relation at all.

emsy2• 5 years ago

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.

enumjorge• 5 years ago

Speaking of ulterior motives, the way web.dev presents itself on the surface as a general web development learning resource feels a little icky, especially since it's clearly very Chrome-focused once you dig in. It's weird to me that what is essentially content marketing for Adobe gets a blog post on this site instead of the Chrome team's blog. As others have mentioned this browser-based Photoshop works only in Chromium. I've never seen MDN push Firefox-specific content like this before.

franga2000• 5 years ago

Yeah, I actively avoid web.dev becauee every time I read something there I end up being steered towards another Chrome-only nonstandard feature. MDN is always clear about what's supported where and when features are Firefox-only, it clearly warns you and provides alternatives and fixes for other browsers.

winternett• 5 years ago

I am still able to run my copy of CS6 without problems thank God... I had to do some tweaks to get it to run on Windows 10 though. Not upgrading to Windows 11 until I have to because I hear that is even more designed to force users into mandatory software updates by creating new incompatibility with older apps.

It's really future OS updates that threaten that.

There have been no major advancements in PhotoShop for my needs that really warrant an upgrade. No added value. I paid for CS6 long ago, and it should run properly without artificial disruptions indefinitely, because that is how it was marketed to me.

Dracophoenix3• 5 years ago

Did you purchase the Master Collection Suite? If you so, is CS6 still viable for commercial-level work? Have apps aside from Photoshop CS6, like Premiere and Flash Pro, continued to work? Do you have any issues with plugins?

karaterobot• 5 years ago

I think what they're saying is more or less true, though they're obviously putting a spin on it. This is them trying to catch up to what professional teams already expect, and what "prosumers" are increasingly expecting. Teams that collaborate on art and design, or who have to deliver assets to other people, moved to the web a few years ago. It's so much nicer.

I also believe them when they say performance was an issue that kept them from doing this until now: the fact that the Photopea guy can do a large subset of Photoshop's functionality in the browser is astonishing, but power users expect a lot more, and wouldn't pay Adobe's organizational licensing fees for anything less.

Yes, this will allow them to enforce their subscription model more tightly, and likely push all kinds of new monetization at users. You're right about that part, I just don't think it's the only reason.

golergka• 5 years ago

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

jb1991• 5 years ago

Subscription pricing models are hardly unique to Adobe. I can’t even find any decent accounting software that doesn’t require some kind of a subscription. It’s pretty common, for better or for worse.

DeathArrow• 5 years ago

Just because something is doable (running a complex app such as an OS or Photoshop or 3D Max in a browser)- doesn't mean that you should do it.

Also, I'd rather own the application (and run it on my computer) and my data rather then rent the application and depend on a company to have access to my data.

mpgs• 5 years ago

ssdsax

skadamat2• 5 years ago

I'm conflicted. I love the technology and workflows that porting large apps to the browser bring you.

But this further moves us away from local first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

People sometimes talk about how crypto / bitcoin will decentralize things, but honestly we just need a better culture of native software. One that brings the best of what modern user interfaces and collaboration have to bring without the headaches of multi-OS development.

PeterBarrett2• 5 years ago

Someone did a really funny presentation on all apps moving to the web and then eventually OS's, followed by OS's running on OS's on the web. If anyone know's where I can find it I would really appreciate a link!

It's pretty relevant to this seeing as it does seem to be where we are going.

rogue7• 5 years ago

I believe you are looking for Gary Bernhardt's talk:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

PeterBarrett2• 5 years ago

Fantastic! Thanks for that, I was searching for a good 20 mins, much appreciated.

maddyboo• 5 years ago

This isn’t what I meant when I asked you for Linux support, Adobe!

tonymet• 5 years ago

Am I the only one longing for the fast, responsive and resource efficient GUI apps of yore?

syspec• 5 years ago

And once everything is running on Chrome, oops we mean uhh the open web, we'll be able to track everything everyone does all the time, without pesky cookies!

- Them, probably

rdsnsca• 5 years ago

Exactly why Google pushes this.

karmanyaahm• 5 years ago

Is Google paying Adobe to bring PS to Chromebooks through the web?

irrational• 5 years ago

It worries me that this is so Chrome focused. I only use Firefox. Will it work in Firefox? Are we moving back to "Works best on Netscape Navigator 4"?

e111077• 5 years ago

FWIW this is the explanation by the lead on the project:

https://twitter.com/BenDelarre/status/1453038054503944194

TL;DR they're using everything that's on the standards track - just waiting for the others to implement them

kiryin• 5 years ago

I, for one, do not like this. Software that doesn't exist on your computer, but instead gets ephemerally downloaded from a server somewhere when you wish to use it, is about as anti-user-freedom as I can possibly imagine. I can ony hope this doesn't become the standard.

josefresco• 5 years ago

This reads like an ad for Google and "the Chrome team".

"Chrome has been working to empower web applications that want to push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser"

"Google Docs was a pioneer of this simplified access"

"Early apps like Gmail showed that more complex interactivity and applications were at least possible"

"No large project can be successfully completed without the appropriate tools for the job, and it's for this reason that the Chrome team developed full featured WebAssembly debugging support."

malepoon• 5 years ago

Indeed. Also, using the generic web.dev domain to market Chrome reminds me a lot of Project NERA.

satvikpendem• 5 years ago

Well, web.dev is owned by Google after all

Photoshop’s journey to the web

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