It’s so unbearably bad that I had to roll back Photoshop to version 27.8 just so I wouldn’t constantly be annoyed at seeing this in my own plugins.
The main recurring issue I’m seeing is… text in the UI will just get unexpectedly squashed/distorted. The behavior is entirely unpredictable, it will happen erratically on and off for any random smattering of text elements, and appears to be somehow related to the vertical location of text in the plugin UI (ie, text elements that look fine in some locations will have a weird squashed appearance if their vertical location changes in the plugin, like if content above is added, expands, the margin above increases, etc, to move the text below it to a different vertical location, text in the UI will randomly phase in and out of this squashed-and-looking-terrible vs. looking-fine-and-normal state. You can even trigger it deterministically/predictably by increasing the margin above certain elements and you’ll see certain text items phase in and out of that squashed/distorted state like clockwork.) This isn’t connected to any one specific sort of text element, I’ve observed this with any kind of text in plugin UIs across everything from text inputs, dropdowns, plain span text, headlines, etc.
Another example: Similar to the above issue, text at certain locations will have dashes inside of it just vanish. For example, if there’s text in your UI that says “your-filename-preview.jpg”, at certain locations the dashes will just disappear and it’ll only render “your filename preview.jpg” with the dashes simply not being visible.
If you use custom fonts or non-whole-number font-size values in your CSS files (ie, 10.75px instead of 11px), there’s an even worse behavior where part of the text will literally get CHOPPED OFF, like, a several-pixel horizontal slice has just been entirely removed from the top or bottom of text, and so only part of the word(s) are even rendered visibly. Like imagine the words “Select Folder” where only the bottom 80% of both words is visible and the top 20% simply is invisible like it’s been erased – that’s what we’re talking about here.
And to clarify, rolling back to 27.8 causes these issues to instantly vanish. So it’s not “you’re probably just writing bad HTML/CSS causing the problems”; it’s “27.9 and above are causing awful CSS/UI bugs in plugins.”
Are any other plugin developers experiencing these specific issues in the 27.9+ versions of Photoshop, and most critically, has anybody found a bulletproof FIX to these problems?
Is the Adobe team working to actively eliminate these specific problems from the upcoming versions of Photoshop?
It’s an extremely frustrating situation for plugin developers who have worked long and hard to make their plugins look excellent, because formerly solid-looking plugins instantly turn into these glitchy buggy-feeling nightmares. It’s also undoubtedly frustrating for users of plugins who have to deal with what feels like glitchy, bug-riddled plugins with bad UIs and makes the plugin developers look like amateurs releasing shoddy software when in reality it’s some specific set of changes/problems in Photoshop/UXP that is the root cause behind this.