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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

> But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost.

Given it's a Javascript program I'm not sure how Photopea solves those problems with Adobe Photoshop other than cost.

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Photopea is very usable on lower-spec machines that grind to a halt when Photoshop is open.

It also "boots" almost instantly, and doesn't require installing anything other than a browser.

True, I have used it briefly on sub $100 Chromebooks.

Yes, certainly, but the article seems to imply that the author solved those Photoshop problems by creating a Web-based tool, while the actual solution is to make a lightweight tool.

Isn't it all the more impressive that it can perform better than a native lightweight app ?

I wish Adobe sold modernized older versions of Photoshop. For most of my uses PS 7 or CS1 is entirely adequate and those versions ran great on a paltry 400Mhz PowerPC G3 with 128MB of RAM, meaning that it'd be blazing fast on the cheapest modern laptops you can find.

Nobody prevents you to reuse an old copy on a VM or a container. With a shared folder you don't have to give it network access.

Practically speaking yes, and it’s probably ok to do that for personal use. Where things get shaky is if you want to use it professionally — even if you buy an old license key off of eBay Adobe could decide the license is no longer valid and sue you.

If you had already that license I don't think Adobe can revoke it. I don't think it is legal to revoke a license that is sold in the second hand market either.

The biggest risk I can think of is that the old product may be in some case vulnerable to compromised documents and by sharing the sandbox folder with your main computer you could in theory get the main machine compromised.

PS performance has been getting worse over the years. I've been using it for almost 20 years and it really peaked with CS6.

The core engine might be fast for computational intensive stuff (eg: radial blur, liquify, etc) but the UI itself is tremendously clunky.

I used to love using PS (and the whole Adobe suite) but now I dread it.

it could do what figma does, use web assembly and web workers

WebAssembly only helps to a small degree here. SIMD support is still too limited and real multithreading will probably never be possible due to spectre vulnerability, so you are leaving about two orders of magnitude of performance on the table.

WebGL 2.0 could be a band aid fix, but it is quite limited compared to CUDA. I'd also expect a bunch of compatibility issues.

As a side note, Photopea already uses WebAssembly.

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