There's a big difference between offering "end-of-life" versions for download, even if they are no longer supported, and forcing users on new versions even if they don't want to (which is fairly common for mobile/web apps and generally subscription-models like Adobe and Autodesk switched to).

That's because the world decided to adopt software as a service model, where your device is just a thin client and real work is happening on a server. And that model is incompatible with letting customers to run old versions.

I.e. exploitation pure and simple - delivering value to customers is incompatible with company exploiting those customers. This deserves as much pushback as possible, even though it seems like a quixotic effort.

That’s not at all true of the Adobe stuff. The real work in Photoshop or Illustrator still happens on the Mac.

But it is only a matter of time. Once webassembly achieves near feature parity with the native versions, you bet Adobe will switch users to the webassembly version.

From Adobe's perspective, it offers a lot of benefits:

- they don't have maintain build farms or pay a CDN to host GBs of binaries of native installers (for different OSes);

- users will always be on the latest (read: most secure) version since there is nothing to install or nag the user to check for updates/apply security patches;

- browser-dependence implies near-persistent Internet access, making license management/enforcement a whole lot easier;

- they can upsell you on cloud storage so that all your assets are available from any web browser.

If the user has to download the whole webassembly binary at the beginning of every session, it seems unlikely that Adobe would save money on CDNs.

Sure if you by "world" you mean bean counters and not users.