In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)

As someone who runs one of those 3rd-party analytics: the JS you add to your site is small, readable, and can be downloaded and included from your own CDN. Hell, you don't even need the script, you can just write your own (not very hard actually). I took a look at Plausible a while ago, and I think the same applies here as well.

With GA, I can do none of that; it's just a massive unreadable blob I can only load from the GA servers. I just have to trust Google doesn't do anything I don't want (including XSS, but also other issues). It's not even easy to figure out what information exactly it collects last time. It's very untransparent and un-auditable and the website equivalent of loading binary kernel blobs.

The concern over xss is important. But the data you send to google opens your users up to a different type of risk.

> rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com

How true is this? There's popularity, and there's significance in the face of Photoshop's market hold. I'd love to believe there's some significant dent being made in Adobe's market share here, but I doubt it.

While GA is free Photoshop has one of the most insanely bloated pricing approaches for casual usage - the fact it's handed out like candy to students (and various institutions allow this instead of familiarizing students with alternatives) is the only reason its kept such a dominant market position.

If your boss asks you for some analytics about site usage the first thing searching the web will turn up is GA and you can have it set up on a test env in less than half an hour including acquiring an API key and reading enough docs to configure it.

I use Photoshop alternatives because they're cheaper than maintaining a perpetual license/subscription, but Photoshop is the big gorilla because it is the best photo editing app in the industry today. Bar none. And that's what lets them get away with their pricing structure.

Nobody would pay for Photoshop if it didn't provide value.

I am (1) a current Photoshop CC subscriber and (2) an owner of the second-to-last version of Photoshop that was available under a perpetual license, and I disagree that Photoshop is the best photo editing app in the industry today.

For photo retouching, I prefer Affinity Photo. One thing I especially appreciate about it is how efficient it is at handling large, 16-bit-per-channel images with many layers.

Photoshop is useful to have around mainly because it makes it somewhat easier to work with certain kinds of PSD files that I get from other people.

I also have Photoshop CC and Affinity Photo, and while I use AP for the simple stuff, it can't hold a candle to the more advanced stuff you can do in Photoshop that is still on the (long-term) plan for AP.

Many people are quite surprised to know that Photoshop has actual competition, even when they don’t really want to pay for the actual thing. It’s often easier to just pay for it than try an alternative which may or many not be right for their needs.

This is the first time I've heard of photopea, thanks for sharing that!