14.0.2.191 performance report. We’re still not moving from Br 12

Adobe rushed from prerelease 14.0.2.174 to beta 14.0.2.181, to public update 14.0.2.191 in only a handful of weeks.  I was just getting ready to post my beta performance observations when the public update 14.0.2.191 was dropped.  I had to start over again after wasting hours evaluating the beta. My report will be in two parts.  The second part regarding the workspace conversions will be posted here in a few days when I can find the time to finish it.

One bright light is that the filter lag that I demonstrated here ,  appears very much improved, though not quite as responsive as Br 12. The same can be said of the selection lag in the folder panel when attempting to furl/unfurl folder hierarchies.

There is still some obvious lag that sometimes creates an unpredictable and transient “sticky feel” when clicking filter selections compared to the reliably instantaneous response of Br 12.  The remaining transient lag was acknowledged by one of the senior engineers when he contacted me privately to invite my impressions on their performance improvements in the current release update.

Thank you for the progress. I’m certain it could be better. Unfortunately, after more than 15 years behind the curtain consulting Adobe on this product, I am forced to consider that in the Br 13/14 era, this may be as good as it gets for the current design architecture.

We should be clear about this.  Any company that offers a production application that consistently takes almost 2 seconds to shut down after clicking on the “X”, has a systemic lag problem that won’t get cured via Wack-A-Mole. Check it for yourselves, folks. Do any of your other applications need to take a moment to think about how to close?

That said, there is still so much pre-existing sloppy code work that first appeared with the inception of Br 13, that Br 12 still remains a dramatically superior tool for serious asset management professionals. Even in its dated condition it still runs rings around the current offering.

Here is a run down.

Content panel Thumbnail Scroll Speed:

Br 14.0.2.191 Is still lagging 3x slower than Br 12.0.4.286 when scrolling thumbs in grid-lock mode. There is really no excuse for this. It is one of the many reasons why so many customers remain loyal to Br 12.  Yeah, another area of performance lag.  Where have we seen/heard about that before?

The design team is still refusing to bring back the arrow keys on the vertical scroll bars that were removed back in the spring of 2022. This severely crippled traditionally fast, efficient, and decades-old thumbnail browsing behaviors. This mistake was pointed out repeatedly in pre-release six months before the first public release version of Br 13 was introduced at the end of 2022. 

This design mistake now forces Adobe customers to continually shift from the mouse to the keyboard arrow keys and back again over and over and over and over and OVER again just to sustain the gridlock feature that prevents the cells from drifting out of phase as they do when scrolling thumbnails using the scroll bar. 

In Br 12 you never needs to take your hand off the mouse or your eyes off the monitor to sustain the “thumbnail-scroll-grid” at full speed, or page-by-page, or line-by-line when browsing assets. Any justification that the design team may make in defense of this ill-advised removal can’t avoid the fact that it was and remains a mechanically destructive and inefficient idea. I imagine that Lumi who is lurking somewhere in this thread would agree.

It’s time to return the arrow keys to the vertical scroll bars and restore a highly valued efficiency that was chopped off 20 months ago without a good reason.

• Do things once, efficiently. 
• Do things automatically whenever possible.

Figure out the overall lag problem, would you please? It got old and annoying last year.

The 8-month-old unzip feature still doesn’t provide the ability to unpack zipped files into the same folder in which the compressed folder exists.  As such it remains the same half-a-loaf I described here. Why should a customer bother with Bridge’s incomplete unzip performance options when Explorer can unpack zipped files to wherever one wishes? 

It’s not a difficult challenge to properly finish the feature.  In fact, it’s pretty easy fix to mimic Explorer unzip behavior.  Adobe hasn’t even tried to find the obvious solution ever since this mistake was brought to their attention in prerelease last summer before it ever became public.

Workspace evaluation comes next.