Pixlr Editor

» see pixlr.com/editor as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Pixlr Editor was the free Photoshop you did not have to pirate. That was its position in Turkey and in most places where a student or a junior engineer needed to crop something and save a PNG without owning a license. It opened in a browser tab with real layers, in about the time it took to find the bookmark.

Ola Sevandersson started building it in Sweden in 2007, writing the code himself while running development for a web community as his day job, and released the first version in the late summer of 2008. The whole thing was Flash, which in 2008 was the only way to put a working editing canvas inside a browser without asking anyone to install anything.

Autodesk announced its acquisition of the Pixlr suite on 19 July 2011 and Sevandersson joined the company. Autodesk kept it running and largely unchanged for six years, then sold it in 2017 to Inmagine, a Malaysian stock-media group, which rebuilt the editors in HTML5 and launched Pixlr X and Pixlr E in 2019. The old Flash editor stayed up beside them, and Pixlr's line to users was that it would keep working as long as your browser still supported Flash.

That stopped being true in January 2021. Adobe ended distribution of Flash Player on 31 December 2020 and began blocking Flash content from running on 12 January. Chrome removed the plugin outright in version 88 later that month, and the editor became a blank rectangle. By March 2021 pixlr.com/editor was no longer the editor at all, just a page asking which of the two new ones you wanted.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The timing was very good. Photoshop was expensive and heavy, GIMP was free and hostile, and the gap between them in 2008 was enormous. Pixlr sat in it with an interface that copied Photoshop's layout closely enough that anyone who had ever used a borrowed copy already knew where the tools were.

By the Autodesk years it was one of the most-used image editors on the web and the standing answer to every forum question about editing an image without buying anything. It spawned a family too: Pixlr Express for quick filters, and Pixlr-o-matic for the retro frames everybody wanted between 2011 and 2013.

~ what got buried with it ~

The HTML5 rebuild is a good product and it is not the same product. Pixlr E gets close to the old layout, but twelve years of keyboard habits do not port, and the Flash editor's exact behavior now exists only in the copy that was preserved before the platform went away.

~ the funny part ~

The Internet Archive has the Flash editor, version 7.1.21b, running under Ruffle. The emulator that resurrects it is the same one the Wayback Machine now loads on its own pages, so an editor killed by the end of Flash is currently reachable through a Flash reimplementation written in Rust. It is slower than it was and it works.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »