Browsers don't have the power or the speed to run the most demanding loads that Photoshop require (especially without using more memory than needed)
At some point you really need to manipulate image data (from/to disk) in weird ways that's just not possible in a browser
Try opening a .jpg file that's bigger than available memory in PS and see how that goes (harder now as memory is not so constrained) as opposed to other softwares
This is not even true in the classical JavaScript world. A 10 year old tiling image viewer (think of any map viewer) proves the opposite.
Given we have WebAssembly and friends nowadays, you can think of the browser as a X86 VM host if you whish, with similar limitations (= no relevant limitations for running PS).
You can't really load giga bytes of data in a web page without that page dying. The issue isn't really what Javascript can or cannot do (though speed is obviously a concern). Even if you manage to stream the data somehow you still need to persist it locally, and I'm pretty sure no browser allows that kind of quota. Photoshop feature complete is not going to run in the browser soon.
If what you said was true we would already have late Xbox 360 and PS3 like games running in the browser...with acceptable performances on high end hardware, which is clearly not the case.
ex-Adobe engineer here - don't be disappointed, I think they'll do it soon.
I was working in the acrobat team till last month, and we were working on porting the Acrobat Reader to the web. When I left it was in the internal beta stage with minor UX tweaking work left. It is expected to be release very soon.
I think similar efforts may be (or will soon be) ongoing in other teams as well.
Interesting. Pretty great that Adobe didn't require a non disclosure of that type of information for a set time after leaving the company like most. Bravo for Adobe for allowing their ex employees freedom to talk about what they are working on.
Yes adobe is pretty open in that respect. Our team was also planning to present this in google io, but somehow that did not materalize and autodesk beat us to the punch by demoing something very similar!
What kind of advantage would this kind of information give to competition? If anything, it shows they're serious about the product, trying new strategies and so on.
There will be likely a WebAssembly-based port to browser as well like what AutoDesk demonstrated recently, with Web DRM locked garden for a change and without any GPU acceleration.
