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.
I feel like Adobe is one of the pioneers for DRM lol, They’ve always kept all their things under some kind of paywall.
HP: I am a joke to you?
Sauce?
It’s from “ace attorney” but I don’t know if that’s an original quote
it wasn’t in the game
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-not-a-clown-you-are-the-entire-circus
Yes. Yes, you are.
HP - Not Even Once™
Their new logo is smashing, though.
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.
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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.
Adobe has already proved they don’t understand web technologies when creating Flash.
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
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.
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.
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.
I loath Adobe but this is the correct answer.
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.
What does Google have to do with Adobe not supporting one specific browser not made by either company?
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 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.
In the scenario where you say warning people doesn’t work, what does “working” mean?
People don’t read warnings. They will still swamp your support department with tickets despite being told their setup is unsupported.
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 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.
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.
Websites supporting safari but not firefox really grinds my gears.If safari can run it, there’s no way Firefox can’t run it too.
Except the supported browsers aren’t a broken, dysfunctional mess on a technical level.
Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.
True. Safari’s only there as a function of Apple’s market mobile prevalence.
“We can’t track you using this browser. Please use one of the following that we have agreements with.”
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.
I don’t understand why Adobe was allowed to survive as a company when Flash player had like 500 security vulnerabilities daily.
and Acrobat too.
Because many companies and users were deliberately turned into illiterates about tech by big tech
When were they ever tech literate?
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 were never but with the growth of big tech it seems that things became even worse.
Because marketing people wanted animatios.
Users wanted games to play, too. Couldn’t do that in HTML4
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?
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!
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
Adobe has been on the DRM bandwagon since forever.
Last Adobe product I used was CS6. That’s what the company stuck with, presumably, to avoid shit like this.
CS6 is nice, i use it as a student. Then by the time i wanna buy it they went subscription only for new version.
Luckily i’m not in the industry that require it.
You could use a user agent switcher to pretend that you are running chrome, edge or anything else
Not if Google’s web DRM thing goes through
Yes I know that
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?
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So the inevitable future begins. This will be the standard web very soon.
Only if people continue to give money to Adobe.
Genuinely can’t see a future where people collectively ditch adobe. They make industry standard products that companies, educational institutions, professionals, etc… buy.
I used to be responsible for the app portfolio in a 1000+ user company, and every 3 years or so I would go back out to the market and try hard to replace Adobe, just for PDF operations. Couldn’t do it because so many products were integrated with them, often in ways we could not reproduce with other products. The best we could do would be to pay for a different product for 1/3 of the cost for Adobe, and then still end up having to carry a significant number of Adobe licenses for cases when integration failed with the other product. No-win situation, and just easier to stay with the evil we knew.
I hate them.
In the AEC field we have Bluebeam as a de facto industry standard for PDFs, and it’s vastly superior to Acrobat in every way for our typical use cases. I imagine it’s a bit harder in other industries, though.
Google is worrying me with their ever-encroaching strategy of limiting internet access through DRM
I2P and TOR network will be my home in near future.
Unfortunately the majority of users or don’t care about privacy or don’t want to spend time to learn how to use other tools and for extremely professional tasks Adobe suite is not easily replaceable.
I’d stop using the web if this happened everywhere. I do use a user agent switcher or Ungoogled Chromium in a pinch though.
This is honestly why I have more then two browsers installed. But it is sad this DRM stuff is spreading.
