Adobe is best known for its controversies with Apple over the flash player on mobile and the amazing photo editing tool Photoshop. Adobe has held its grip over the image editing market for a while now. Since over a decade it also remains my favourite tool for editing photographs, no matter how small the editing work is. Now, as Adobe updates Photoshop, it is left with a challenge to support an outdated operating system.
Microsoft’s decade old Windows XP still runs on about 46% of the computers on this planet. Heck, it still runs on majority of the systems in our office as well. Apparently, Microsoft has had its issues getting XP and IE6 users to upgrade. And while web development companies have forever hated this challenge to optimize their websites for IE6, there is little option that remains for Adobe when it comes to XP. Adobe has made the move and announced that CS6 is the last version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. That said, the next major release of Photoshop (CS7?) won’t support the 11 year old, yet popular operating system.
Adobe announced the news in a blog post, citing that XP users are already missing out on several features that modern operating systems with upgraded GPUs offer. So while you may be missing 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features on Windows XP if you run CS6, Adobe perhaps is being over apologetic with the news. XP users very well know the trade off and I know happy Photoshop users who love working on the good old version 7 (for records CS6 is version 13).
With Windows 7 taking over XP in number of installs and impending launch of Windows 8, we can expect the good old XP memories to fade away sooner or later!