- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3376057
I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until my job required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn’t the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.
Nah, honestly I get this. They likely don’t let you run it in Safari either.
The problem is that each browser use different rendering and JavaScript engines. They all follow the same spec, but implement things differently, and at a different pace. Firefox tends to be really speedy with adding features.
Rendering is one thing, but for web apps the main issue is how they each implement JavaScript differently. Chromium uses the V8 engine, Safari uses JavaScriptCore, and Firefox uses SpiderMonkey.
Each one of these implementations handle certain JS features differently.
Array.prototype.sortis a good example.This means that when developing your application you need to keep track of what differences each browser has, and write/use polyfills or conditionals to ensure that your methods work as expected on all platforms.
This becomes cumbersome quickly, and easily leads to a messy code base and technical debt as the application grows.
It further complicates testing since you’ll need to test each release on each browser.
The easy cop-out solution is to just support a single platform, and direct people not on that platform to use the browser you’ve developed for.
The go-to choice there is obviously Chrome, since it has the most users. Photoshop Express is a free application developed with the hopes of hooking people onto buying a subscription. Thus they’d want as big a reach as possible. It would make no sense to develop for Firefox and push people to use that instead from a business perspective, most people wouldn’t just download a second browser just to use an app.
Edit: you can obviously spoof your user agent and bypass the check that way. Some features might be broken in Firefox though, and I wouldn’t expect a fix.
As a developer with 7+ years industry experience this is a very weak excuse to not support browsers.
Differences in features are usually down to bleeding edge stuff and I don’t think your example of sort would apply because the end result is the same.
I know Adobe are more prone to using newer browser features but there really shouldn’t be anything that’s not simple enough to assure support across all browsers. Especially for a company as big as Adobe. It’s inexcusable. We rarely have to use polyfills now, that was more a problem when I was starting out, mainly due to IE11 still holding out.
That’s literally the first supported browser they list in OP’s screenshot.
Hmm. Good point.
Could be because Safari is using WebKit and so people assume that Safari and Chrome works the same way because back in the day they were quite close.
WebKit is Apple’s fork of KHTML and KJS, both originally made by the KDE project (yes that KDE) for the Konqueror browser.
Google used WebKit (WebCore specifically) when building Chromium, but replaced KJS with a new JavaScript engine called V8. V8 is still used in Chromium today, but also went on to become Node.js
Apple forked KJS, their version is now called JavaScriptCore.
The support for Safari could be because of an assumption that since Chromium was built from Safari, they’d work more or less the same, but they don’t.
It seems more likely that Adobe supports Safari because Safari is the main browser on macOS. Adobe supports Windows and macOS (and I would guess a lot of their users are on macOS), so it doesn’t make sense not to support it, regardless of how cumbersome that makes the codebase.
Additionally, Photoshop Web (Beta), which is available to paying customers, has the same levels of browser support.
While we’re talking about history, Firefox was originally called Phoenix, then Firebird (trademark infringements), and was born from the ashes of Netscape Navigator (and the original architect behind the Mozilla project did not have much faith in the future of Mozilla and left the company/project).
Microsoft Edge was previously based on EdgeHTML, which was canned within 2 years, and is now based on Chromium. Opera used the Presto engine for a long time, but now uses Chromium, and a bunch of Opera developers used this as an excuse to split and create their own browser with their own—yeah, okay, Vivaldi uses Chromium too. There was a time when Google promoted Firefox on the front page of google.com instead of Internet Explorer. A time obviously before Google Chrome became a thing—after that, Firefox’s position as “second-most popular browser” was quickly retired. It’s kind of crazy Firefox ever managed to get that much market share considering it was competing with pre-installed browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari; Firefox was never pre-installed on any platform except GNU/Linux.
And Konqueror is still kind of around today. First comes the Navigator, then the Explorer, and then the Konqueror, anybody?
core-jshas existed for nearly a decadeSafari is one of the listed supported browsers
“Firefox uses spidermonkey”
So THAT’S why the extension is called grease monkey.
this was a great explanation. I’m fully onboard with the “fuck Google and their web drm nonsense” but there has to be a disconnect from avoiding bad actors and recognizing the reality of the industry. ty for posting.
I feel like it’s necessary to mention that I’m just speculating, and don’t have any affiliation with Adobe, thus I can’t say for certain that I know why they choose to not support Firefox.
I’ve been in the position before though where I’ve chosen not to support non Blink/V8 browsers for the reasons listed above.
The fragmented nature of the web platform makes it a pain to develop for, in a way you don’t necessarily experience with “real” languages.
I have been, and honestly still am, of the opinion that Mozilla should just forego their engine and move to Chromium. Not because one is better than the other - if anything I think Mozilla’s implementations are, as they tend to be more “by the book” - but in unifying the web platform it’d be easier to develop for, and it would bring the added bonus of Google not having as big a monopoly on what goes on in Chromium.
Microsoft moving to Chromium was big in that sense, so I’d love to see an established FOSS vendor like Mozilla exert their influence on the project.
Yes, move all browsers to chromium and give google absolute and total dominion of the internet.
What a fucking brilliant idea.
Problem isnt browsers, anyway. Problem is adobe locking their bullshit behind subscriptions and DRM instead of just being able to buy it and own it like you used to.
Would Mozilla and Microsoft get control over Blink and Chromium? Surely someone has ultimate power over which pull requests are merged into main(or however they do it), and that’s Google. Mozilla could fork, but now they’re back to the problem of developing their own browser to compete with Chromium.