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.
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.
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.
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.
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 got in on the Kickstarter for the Abode (not a misspelling) software suite by Stuart Semple and am hoping that when they release that it at least beats Darktable. Also, Darktable is pretty great as a free alternative to Lightroom.
Edit: I named him because he created the Freetone color palette when Pantone upped their license fee on Adobe. He also made a few paints and sells them at reasonable prices as an accessible alternative to more expensive paints.
Also DigiKam for the photo management side of things (I usually find that DarkTable is best suited for retouching). Between these two I don’t feel the need for anything Adobe. Granted, I’m just a hobbyist so I can’t speak from a professional point of view.
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).
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.
Because the folks doing the work aren’t the folks paying the bills. You’ve gotta invade some country and exploit the shit out of them for several years if you expect to have enough money to have a voice!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
I just checked it out on mine. The regular version of Adobe Express works just fine in Firefox, but the “new Adobe Express (beta)” throws up an “unsupported browser” error in Firefox.
OP, look around for “use prior version” links on Adobe Express’s website, as that will send you into the version that works in Firefox.
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This is seriously deserving of an antitrust investigation. An open web is essential.
*Edit: referring to Chrome and its derivatives, not Adobe. Alphabet/Google has been begging for antitrust action for years.
How would that be an antitrust issue?
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.
It’s far more likely that Adobe is just being lazy/cheap in not supporting a browser with a small market share.
Yeah, to be clear, I think Google should be the target of multiple antitrust actions. This is just a symptom.
It’s because firefox wont support the drm protocol that chromium/webkit will be pushing
No it’s not?
Many websites are only ever tested to work on Chrome because companies don’t care about catering to the smaller userbases of the other browsers.
I loath Adobe but this is the correct answer.
What does Google have to do with Adobe not supporting one specific browser not made by either company?
Adobe is requiring customers to choose one of three different competing browsers, none of which are owned by Adobe.
There’s no antitrust issue here.
And still it’s basically all Google.
Only if you believe Apple is basically Google.
Ah it will be at done point
That’s what they used to say about Microsoft.
Adobe has already proved they don’t understand web technologies when creating Flash.
What a ridiculous, tech-ideology-above-all-else take. Not to mention over a decade past being relevant.
Flash could do things other technology at the time could not. It served a purpose at the time, thus its huge level of popularity.
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.
They didn’t create Flash. They bought a company called Macromedia who had created Flash.
Proving they don’t understand web technologies…
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.
I remember when it was FutureSplash Animator, and my young mind was blown by the possibilities of animations in only a few kb.
Wow I’ve been in tech a long time, but only knew it from Macromedia. Crazy
They’ve been on the DRM bandwagon ever since they started making people log into their apps.
For an admin, their license management crap takes so much extra time and effort that it’s not tolerable. They’re just not good people.
Adobe is a curse word where I come from.
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.
I would be surprised if eveything works correctly. Generally they don’t just decide that something isn’t supported for no reason
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.
deleted by creator
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.
People don’t read warnings. They will still swamp your support department with tickets despite being told their setup is unsupported.
I got in on the Kickstarter for the Abode (not a misspelling) software suite by Stuart Semple and am hoping that when they release that it at least beats Darktable. Also, Darktable is pretty great as a free alternative to Lightroom.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/culturehustle/abode-a-suite-of-world-class-design-and-photography-tools
Edit: I named him because he created the Freetone color palette when Pantone upped their license fee on Adobe. He also made a few paints and sells them at reasonable prices as an accessible alternative to more expensive paints.
Also DigiKam for the photo management side of things (I usually find that DarkTable is best suited for retouching). Between these two I don’t feel the need for anything Adobe. Granted, I’m just a hobbyist so I can’t speak from a professional point of view.
Oh, this shit again.
Remember when websites required the Internet Explorer? It didn’t follow Web Standards back then.
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).
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.
Chargeback time.
Hello Bank? Yes I’d like to issue a stop payment
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.
That’s fraud.
Thankfully I am not required to use any Adobe products. Seeing this would seriously insult me.
the only thing I’ll accept using one of those browsers for is installing a new OS on my phone, as ff just does not support that. aside from that, idc
Why do you need a browser on a PC to install new OS on your phone?
I mean u don’t, it’s just a hell of a lot easier
I don’t understand why Adobe was allowed to survive as a company when Flash player had like 500 security vulnerabilities daily.
Because the folks doing the work aren’t the folks paying the bills. You’ve gotta invade some country and exploit the shit out of them for several years if you expect to have enough money to have a voice!
Because many companies and users were deliberately turned into illiterates about tech by big tech
When were they ever tech literate?
They were never but with the growth of big tech it seems that things became even worse.
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.
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.
Who’d disallow them?
and Acrobat too.
Because marketing people wanted animatios.
Users wanted games to play, too. Couldn’t do that in HTML4
This is honestly why I have more then two browsers installed. But it is sad this DRM stuff is spreading.
Go Affinity/Serif. Haven’t looked back.
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.
I gotta admit I run a 350k image lightroom catalog as well, neither open source clone is even close. The license fee for PS and LR is reasonable too.
350k? As in, 350,000 images? Holy shit, man. How do you have that many pictures? And how much storage space does that eat up? All of it?
deleted
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.
This is crap too tho.
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.
Why should that fall on the developer if you choose not to upgrade?
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.
Could you just get an extension that changes your user agent? They exist. I wonder if it would work.
I bet it would because Firefox supports pretty much everything Chrome supports. Sometimes a little better.
The Adobe message has nothing to do with the technical limitations of your browser and everything to do with their monopolistic nature as a company.
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.
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?!
I can’t believe I never thought about that - gotta try this later today
@galaxi What version of FF are you using? I can access Adobe Express perfectly fine (116.0.1 on Win 11 Pro)
I just checked it out on mine. The regular version of Adobe Express works just fine in Firefox, but the “new Adobe Express (beta)” throws up an “unsupported browser” error in Firefox.
OP, look around for “use prior version” links on Adobe Express’s website, as that will send you into the version that works in Firefox.
“We can’t track you using this browser. Please use one of the following that we have agreements with.”