Not moving from Br 12 to 14 – yet.
I will attempt to make this as brief as possible, but it may run too long for some folks.
In short, the Bridge 13/14 era has been a large waste of time and resources from the perspective of many Adobe customers who have been using Br as an integral part of our commercial business practices ever since it was first introduced back in 2005. I was invited to join the Bridge Prerelease Team by Chris Cox shortly thereafter. I have run my professional workflows through many dozens of prerelease (PR) builds since that time.
My studio currently employs Br 12.0.4.286 Release as the only version of Bridge organizing our productivity. I refused to migrate to Br 13 and continue to reject the idea of migrating to Br 14. Let me be clear. Nothing about what I say here should be understood as advocating that those who have already drunk the Br 13 or 14 Kool-Aid should revert to Br 12. I will, however, encourage those who have wisely remained with Br 12 in light of the Br 13/14 train wreck, to remain patiently persistent and inform Adobe about your dissatisfaction.
Nearly 18 months ago, (May 2022) Adobe introduced the first internal PR build of Br 13. Never in all my years of PR testing have I witnessed a more poorly thought out and destructive build to our studio’s long-established professional workflows. From the destruction wrought by trashed and demoted custom workspaces to the elimination of the multiple window feature, plus a huge laundry list of performance bugs, I found the first PR build as something that would take a very large investment in time just to re-configure our workspaces on a single machine so that it could be tested in our studio workflows. With the additional removal of the multiple window feature, I could not justify that sort of investment in time to do anything more than rudimentary poking around. I told the prerelease Adobe engineers exactly that.
I also informed them that the potential destruction of professional workflows that these changes would demand of Adobe customers would be unacceptable to many whose productivity relies on this application being at the center of those workflows. I was informed that my concerns were “a top priority”.
Six months and several rounds of PR builds later produced no significant changes to the destruction despite repeated warnings that little had changed. It was announced to the PR team that Adobe planned to release the PR version to the newly established public Bridge beta crowd. Adobe was told that this was a mistake and that the build wasn’t nearly ready, but they plowed ahead anyway. More howls from the new Bridge beta crowd, and a few months later, Br 13 was released to Adobe customers in a state that just a few years ago wouldn’t have made it out of prerelease.
Fast forward to July of this year. The first internal PR version of Br 14 was dropped. While the introduction of the shortcut feature was greatly welcomed, as was the re-introduction of the multi-window feature, the rest of the software remained just as damaged and unresponsive as it had ever been. Again, Adobe was informed that this was not ready for prime time. The workspace migration destruction remains the exact same mess that it was in the first Br 13 PR drop 18 months ago, leaving workspaces that have migrated flawlessly for more than 15 years mangled, useless and pushed to the back of the workspace line. This is to say nothing of the hideous lag in performance that makes scrolling through thumbnails, moving files, and other forms of filtration and navigation through an asset base as unwelcome as root-canal, and an unnecessarily large drain on studio time and manpower.
I for one do not consider this as either professional or acceptable. Our studio remains in the Br 12 universe. Unfortunately, now it no longer completely interfaces with the current release versions of other Adobe point products. There exist some simple workarounds for this, but these will degrade over time. Perhaps that is what Adobe is counting on to shut people like me up.
I am not afraid of change if it is productive. I try not to sweat the small stuff. The addition of the keyboard shortcut feature is a shining example. Otherwise, this 18-month process has been heavily destructive to those who are experts in the use of Bridge in professional studio environments, and who have said so privately to Adobe many times during the numerous PR/public beta drop cycles.
I understand the inclination for Adobe to listen to the needs of hobbyists and semi-pros and try to respond to those needs with design mods and additions. However, I am firmly against the idea that those needs, and the resulting changes must severely damage or completely destroy the years-old professional workflows of experienced power-users as a consequence.
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