Yeah i know i am a bit late to the party but i tried to use the new Br as little as possible because to be honest it annoyed the living hell out of me. And this for a couple of reasons. So I thought my feedback would not be educated enough. I thought it might be that I just don't understand it because I don't know it enough.
Maybe just a quick word about myself to put the feedback better into perspective. I have been working in the media industry for almost 20 years I guess in a very broad range from doing complex highres composings in Photoshop to lighting modeling simulating rendering cgi stuff in many non Adobe products (Houdini, Maya, Zbrush,...). I am using Adobe software daily for living and would consider myself as a sophisticated user.
So yesterday I took the time to look into the "new" way of working with panels. And I have to say I don't get it. What is the advantage for the user again? I mean it's not completely wrong. Of course it's nice to be able to have multiple panels but it's so half-hearted thought out. You can have multiple content panels but only one preview, one folder tree .... in my opinion that makes a really confusing user experience. I mean Bridge has already been there for how many years and this is what UX designers come up with? I work mostly on Windows and actually a nice newer feature in Windows are those new window layout helpers (i guess windows users know what i mean). But of course they don't work with those external panels because they are apparently not drawn as normal windows-windows/panels.
I am a big fan of this "Browse in Adobe Bridge" context menu option in the windows explorer. That used to point to that clicked folder in the last open bridge window or open a new window. Now it opens a new content panel. if you do that a couple of times you already have this "Maximum tabs opened" message. Then as far as I can see there is no 1-click solution to close a panel. Or is there? And apparently from ("https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/bridge/using/adobe-bridge-keyboard-shortcuts.html") there is no keyboard shortcut to close a panel - please tell me there is one.
It's an endless list of bad UX design decisions in my opinion. Strange enough I never looked into this - but there isn't a keyboard shortcut editor in bridge - right? Come on! It's 2023.
In my opinion users should not be forced to change their workflows and if this ever should be needed it should be for very good reasons and very well made. And it is at least questionable if either one was the case here. I read in the "Adobe Bridge Beta is now available (13.0.3.686)" post ...
"Also, we are hearing your requests about reintroducing Multiple Bridge windows. This Beta release does not include this requested feature, but the Bridge team is working on it, analyzing the use cases, and constructing an appropriate action plan. Please stay tuned." It would be nice if Adobe could speed up a little.
If the Adobe Bridge development really doesn't know how it should be done better then look at the window management in other software. For instance Sidefx Houdini. Of course you cannot compare the programs at all by its purpose but the window management. Something like this would be amazing. Whatever content wherever. You can link panels together. Everything for workflow craziness. And even there you could open multiple instances of the program.
Don't get me wrong. I am thankful for all the tools Adobe provides us to do what we do and in my daily business a visual file browser like Bridge is actually a big part of my workflow and a big relief or helper if done right. The good news for Adobe is that still there is no real competitor and they are allowed to mess around a lot. But that is not necessarily the case for ever. At least in my surrounding people who don't need certain features started switching to Affinity. I once had a nokia phone as well. 🙂
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