- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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“We can’t track you using this browser. Please use one of the following that we have agreements with.”
So the inevitable future begins. This will be the standard web very soon.
I’d stop using the web if this happened everywhere. I do use a user agent switcher or Ungoogled Chromium in a pinch though.
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.
This is honestly why I have more then two browsers installed. But it is sad this DRM stuff is spreading.
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.
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?
QA is probably just not testing on FF because of user share. And if it’s not going through QA, you just don’t support it as bog coorp…
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.
Which is really sad because Safari used to be one of the best browsers over a decade ago now.
What happens if you spoof the user agent?
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.
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?!
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.
I can’t believe I never thought about that - gotta try this later today
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/mozilla-firefox/246039/tip-use-firefox-for-web-apps
I haven’t tried this yet, and the page is from 2021. Perhaps the feature is still experimental or lost. Otherwise I use chromium to avoid the Google bloat.
decided to check out of curiosity and couldn’t see the pref from the article listed in my config (im on 116.0), ~i’d imagine theres a chance it would work if manually adding that pref and setting to true but i have no idea where i could test it since i don’t use any sites that would need that pref to work.~
wonder if user agent spoofing would work, probably wouldn’t hurt to try that as well
They dropped it in the desktop browser after a while, but I think you can do it with an extension or something.
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.
What does Google have to do with Adobe not supporting one specific browser not made by either company?
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I loath Adobe but this is the correct answer.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Adobe has been on the DRM bandwagon since forever.
You don’t need windows for edge/chrome though, what’s stopping you just using edge or chrome on Linux?
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
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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).
User-agent switcher to get around it?
Digital RESTRICTIONS management / DRM is the core of Adobe
