Re:Figma removed `window.figma` on view-only pages today
by mortenjorck on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @12:49PM
(#39757691)
Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've only been on small design teams during the rise of Figma – but my view is that "multiplayer" was always a sell-to-managers feature, and at best an annoyance for designers.
Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance.
Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison.
Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance.
From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis.
Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up.
Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance.
Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison.
Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance.
From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis.
Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up.