I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until Adobe, and therefore my job, required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn’t the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.
When I mentioned Windows, I meant that Adobe also requires Windows 10. And I don’t believe in using edge or chrome because they’re both anti-privacy. I feel like a huge company like Adobe aim to be compatible on most browsers and shouldn’t limit their website visibility because of the browser you’re using, especially with something like Firefox which is well-known. It sets a bad precedent for other websites to do the same, which cuts off the freedom of the web.
That does suck but useragent switchers surely get around that for now?
I think sometimes you’ve gotta just minimise the amount of proprietary/anti privacy stuff you use. Why not just run windows in a VM and pass your GPU in for Photoshop? No need to switch fully
What's extra stupid about these, is most of the time just using a user agent switcher to make the site think you're on chrome or opera makes it work just fine.
Sometimes it's as simple as something like "firefox doesn't support import maps", but now they do (in 108+) but nobody has the time or inclination to go back and validate that the site now works in firefox.
I do understand it. These are browsers that they decided during development that are not supported. Not supported means not tested by a full QA team for months. And users are generally stupid, soba simple warning (use at your own risk) is something that does not work.
So they decide to just not support the other browsers.
To be clear, I am definitely not a fan of Adobe of this mechanism, just explaining.
You can say browser X may cause issues on the website, but people will still complain that browser X doesn’t work properly and demand you to fix whatever issue they’re having.
I hate them more for pioneering Software as a Service rent seeking crap. Why own software when you can become a revenue stream for Adobe. Die in a fire.
As a software developer I have sympathy for this business model, but of course pricing has to be reasonable. A piece of software is a continuing social responsibility for the developer to fix new security issues, incompatibilities and bugs. If you only get paid a one-off sum the maintenance can drain you. A continued time-based fee is more in tune with how the actual development cost pans out.
A continual stream of revenue is great, understandably. But I would much prefer it if I could instead purchase v.1.34 of a software and get updates until major changes come. At which point I’d still have my v.1.3x with all its functions but if I wanted the new stuff (and the security patches with it) I’d need to pay for v.1.4x. Corporations (that probably much more require the security updates than hobbyists) wouldn’t see much of a change and hobbyists could have a good alternative to subscriptions.
That’s not how developers see it. We have a responsibility to push security updates to you even if you stay on 1.3x, because if your machine is compromised it can be used to further attack others. It’s similar to how people have a social responsibility to vaccinate themselves to protect others, but in the software world that responsibility falls on the software producers rather than you personally.
A big challenge here is that the cost and time required to develop and test a security fix is proportional to the number of software versions in circulation. So it’s better for everyone if we can keep everybody on the latest version.
That’s a question of political ideology. I can just say that right now that’s what the general expectation is. Or at least, corporations get enough flak if they don’t fix the issues that they feel compelled to take the responsibility and avoid badwill. But one could certainly imagine a law where individual users are liable for the malware running on their PC:s instead.
Personally I think it’s good that developers take the responsibility, because there are too many users that will not upgrade and that causes a societal problem. For example, it becomes hard for banks to protect accounts when people log in using PCs that have tons of software with security holes.
Reminds me to how Google Meet does not support background blur in Firefox, but magically support it when you fake the user agent to chrome. Like, wtf?!
Well, in this case it might even be a technological limitation, which can be solved with a workaround but leads to a poor user experience.
Firefox, for security reasons, doesn’t allow opening local files for writing. That means, it’s not possible to make a web application that can autosave to your machine after you open a file, meaning you have to download a new version of the file every time you save. You can get around this issue by importing the files in question to the browser’s local storage, or by using cloud storage via an API, but local saving is a feature that people have come to expect and missing it will lead to complaints from the users.
The missing API is called File System Access API and has been available on Chrome for years. I’ve personally had to write my web apps around this limitation multiple times, since I want to support Firefox. By no means is this a valid reason to exclude Firefox in my opinion, but I can also easily see why a company would want to not bother with user feedback on ctrl+s not working in their web application.
But they support Safari though, what’s the excuse for that? According to this page, safari supports level for file system access api is similar with Firefox.
My best guess is the dates on which the feature was added, which can also be seen on CanIUse. Firefox added OPFS support in March this year, and much of the userbase (AFAIK e.g. Firefox ESR) is still lacking the feature – in any case it’s a very recent change on Firefox. However, webkit/Safari has had OPFS for over two years by now. I was personally unaware of the support having been added to Firefox as well, last time I checked the discussion they told they weren’t going to implement the API.
By no means is this an acceptable excuse in my opinion, this kind of check should always be done by checking the existence of the feature, not the UA string. Though it might be that the check is still performed in the correct way as Safari users stuck on older version are also encountering the issue. But if they’re fine with using OPFS, where you need to export the files separately to access them outside the browser context (as the storage is private), there’s no reason to complain about recent Firefox versions that support this feature.
But, the same point still stands, kind of. The main underlying problem is Google forcing new standards through Chromium, without waiting for industry consensus and a proper standard. Then, as 80% of the userbase already has the feature everyone else is forced to get on board. I still don’t really see Adobe as the main culprit here, despite the apparent incompetence in writing compatibility checks, but Google with their monopolistic practices with the Chromium project. Adobe isn’t innocent and has done the industry a lot of harm in the form of being one of the original pushers of subscription software, but I don’t think this instance should be attributed to malice rather than incompetence.
Edit: So, a bit of additional advice for someone trying to get this to work: in case the UA spoofing doesn’t help, check the Firefox version in use – it has to be 111 or newer, as 111 was the release where File System API support was added. Firefox ESR probably doesn’t have it available. Also check that FS API / OPFS doesn’t need to be enabled through some flag or configuration parameter, and that it’s not blocked by some plugin.
If safari is supported, then there is no reason to not supporting Firefox. What key features supported by safari required by adobe that’s not supported by Firefox?
Out of all the modern browsers, it’s always Safari that I end up needing to write compatibility code for. I’m sure the app works fine on Firefox, they just haven’t tested it.
Tbf, while daily-driving Firefox I do occasionally encounter websites (mostly web apps) that do not work on Firefox. But it’s often a pretty simple fix, like sometimes I can get around it myself just through Dev Tools shenanigans.
Love and use them for Photo, Publisher, and Designer, but there’s no alternative for Lightroom. And honestly, I like Lightroom. It truly is the best at what it does. Simple, easy to use, great features, thoughtful design.
They bought all competition for their creative suite. They werent “allowed” to survive, they made sure they were the only viable game in town and locked businesses into contracts.
I guess the first step is to ask yourself about the services that you use daily , this was my first step to understand the importance of free software and all correlate topics but each person will have its own pathway to literation.
Adobe reactivated my subscription without my permission and now won’t refund me. They have records of my subscription being cancelled in May but can’t explain why I was suddenly billed again in August.
I’m going to try Adobe customer service one more time, but this may be the route I go. I always try to avoid chargebacks because it can lead to stuff just getting sent to collections which is more harmful than eating the payment.
Flash was pretty significant in the web’s journey to where it is today. For things like online video, it was the least pain in the ass way, in a time when the alternative was crapware plug-ins like RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player.
YouTube probably wouldn’t have existed without Flash and FLV.
Many popular things are crappy. It is not an ideology, unless you consider the scientists who invented the WWW to be some freaks.
Flash wasn't really useful, because many people couldn't display these websites. It was the exact opposite of WWW. WWW enabled people to use hypertext and provided accessibility.
Google forcing people to use its browser or pushing companies to develop exclusively for its browsers has broad antitrust implications, especially if they are using their ad clout to push wider adoption.
I know people love saying that IE didn’t follow web standards, but the reality is more nuanced. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator both had non-standard features, and a lot of the non-standard features IE had predated any relevant standards.
I think people’s problem with IE came much later, after MS had used its monopoly in the operating system market to establish IE as a monopoly in the browser space, to then freeze it as IE6 for years and years.
With IE6 so dominant, even mandated for most people (with ActiveX being the de facto bypass to IE/HTML4 limitations), web designers assumed its universality and stopped caring about anything else, practically contributing to the stagnation of the web standards around an obsolete and suboptimal Implementation.
The better, faster, more compliant and innovative browsers had no chance of dislodging IE, while a growing number of decreasingly tech savvy users could see (from the experience of Firefox and Opera mostly) how bad they had it with IE and how much behind it had fallen.
Yep, the web was a mess back then (still is, tbh), but the hatred for IE/MS is deserved, and comes back with a sour taste as we are witnessing the same thing all over again (just in slower motion).
The NHS' virtual appointment service in the UK doesn't support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of "please view this website in Internet Explorer 6" are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.
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