Figma’s dev mode was just a way to take existing functionality and gate it behind a higher price point under the guise of “new functionality”.
As a developers i found it simpler to access css from figma via the old inspect vs. having to toggle in and out of dev mode.
It is shady to take a commonly used feature and move it behind a higher tier after years of offering to people already giving you money. Just classic VC driven startups trying to screw over its loyal customers.
Yes, everything was better before dev mode. Toggling between the two modes is pretty annoying, it's extra annoying when I think about how I'm paying extra for the inconvenience.
I'd be much happier if they just gave me the old UI with a higher price point, just so I don't have to switch between the two modes.
I'm glad to hear I'm not alone in thinking Dev Mode was stupid and worse than what existed before. I don't use Figma a ton right now but I had no issues before Dev Mode and a number of times I was confused on how to get to what I wanted after Dev Mode came out.
I didn’t know anything was degraded (I’m not the one doing tooling decisions in my org. There were some emails about dev mode, but nothing that really highlighted any impact/changes) until a developer reached out to me a couple weeks ago and wanted to know the names of a couple of icons, colors, etc.
The changes were a clear step backwards and this change shows some real pettiness. I guess if you’re on top, money is better than goodwill. Seems like they’re turning the monetization to 11 now after investors couldn’t cash out with Adobe. Let’s not forget that it was Adobe that ultimately called it off.
Another reason to only trust offline (preferably open-source) tools. So that one day your workflow cannot be shattered by some greedy manager or business changing their "vision".
Penpot is great! It works really well, and the UX design is solid. Except for the few times I tried it, it ground to a halt after a couple hours and ten frames, crashing the tab when trying to do common things like add a text object (which can't be transformed into a path yet btw, rip). Oh well, must be something wrong with my browser...
In practice the vast majority of designers are using Mac, so it's not like it not being cross platform was the problem.
The thing that made Sketch lose against Figma was that they never really tackled the issue of collaboration until Figma came along, leaving it for 3rd parties like Invision and others to solve.
Now they have most of the collaboration features they were missing, but by then it was too late and Figma had all the mindshare.
But if Figma keeps following this route, who knows. We might see Sketch grow in mindshare again.
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.
The Mac-only support wasn't an issue. I love Sketch, and I used to like it more than Figma. What happened is that Figma resolved many things that were a headache with Sketch:
- No more file-sharing issues. Designers are not good at using tools like git. I used git+lfs to store my designs, but most of the design team used Google Drive or Dropbox. In both cases, you end up in a situation where the file you are looking at is not up-to-date. Figma removed that issue.
- Design reviews: Collaborating on the same design as in many Figma demos is rare. However, playing with the design in a remote session is common during a design review.
- The pace of updates: Figma moved faster to improve the editor's UX. The auto-layout, styles, components, and variables are good additions to everyday work. It took Sketch a while to update the editor's UX.
There is no return once the team purchases the Figma subscription instead of renewing Sketch. When I started using Figma (around 2019), I hated its slowness and missed some Sketch features. Our UX team adopted Figma, and only a few designers continued using their Sketch license (I was one of them). But, it didn't make sense to not align with the rest of the team (for the reasons mentioned before). I haven't used Sketch since then. Sketch added many sharing features, but there isn't a solid reason to go back and convince the team to migrate their designs.
I really really love Sketch, and for all the reasons that make it different to Figma.
I just hope they don’t go too deep into Figma’esque cloud features (at least without being able to opt out) because Sketch is a really superb standalone piece of Mac software and I appreciate it for that.
Didn't know Sketch did cross-platform hand-off nowadays.
Yet, I still don't believe "most" designers use Sketch, except in some "niches" like startups for example, or really design-heavy industries. Probably differs wildly by country too. What I've seen used most in the wild is Figma and Adobe tools, a lot of times on Windows.
It sounds to me that if your team is relying that much on inspecting values, you're doing the developers (or designers) a disservice one way or another. A well defined set of design tokens is all that's needed, and isn't rocket science either. Not to mention that encouraging developers to copy-paste CSS should be frown upon anyway.
That strongly reminds me on telerik themebuilder: https://themebuilderapp.telerik.com/
They allow you to inspect the designs like a dev mode but once you start customising it they charge you for "define a variable". I really hope this is no behavior to enforce devs to pay for IDE functionalities in the future.
So this is kind of tangentially related here, but is there a "state-of-the-art" or best practices on digging through big JS apps / frameworks / objects? Ultimately this is all code running on my machine, so it feels like it should be accessible in the console somewhere.
I've had to do a fair amount of this with a Chrome extension I maintain that hooks in to routing (creating bike / running routes) sites, and fortunately these mostly use React and I'm decently familiar with how to hook in to that.
But is there a limit here? Is there a way to actually keep code from being inaccessible to the console (aside from obfuscation / compiling to wasm)?
Not in a way that differs from old-fashioned web scraping. If the website you're targeting is built using a framework and is server-side rendered then it'll most definitely also send all the data it needs for hydrating on the client as JSON, usually attached to the window object as "window.__INITIAL_STATE__" or similar. There are no limits :–)
I'm working in vue, and get lost at the transition between my code and the framework stuff, when an error "falls through the cracks", and the call stack comes from the framework. What do you do for that, even?
If Figma continues along this path I worry that they are doomed.
Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.
It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.
So this is the enshitification stage of Figma? Weren’t they already profitable? They should be ashamed to switch from product excellence to vendor lock in.
No such thing as shame in business. I see this as a wake up call and an opening for an alternative.
Postman was cool, until they started squeezing out pennies, and now we switched to Bruno (until the cycle repeats).
The good thing is that along the way, evolution takes place. The new product moves fast, while the dominant product starts to have trouble catching up due to codebase size and legacy.
I guess that after the Adobe acquisition failed and their leadership missing out on those sweet, sweet billions of exit dollars, they now decided to do what Adobe would've done anyway, squeeze out as much money as possible as quickly as possible before everything falls apart.
Then again, people that are still Figma customers should be okay with that. They didn't jump ship after the initial Adobe takeover announcement, so they are clearly not concerned about enshittification and price-gouging - so let them have what they want.
Is there a good reason for this? Seems like leaving it in is fairly low maintenance, but the introduction of Dev Mode appears to be a shitty cash grab.
As the person mentions, they're pretty deep into Figma so perhaps they believe that people will just keep eating their bad decisions.
I assume that something changed with the failed sale to Adobe? Figma seems to be enshittifying. The sale to Adobe was already dubious and obviously for the cash, despite the PR stuff they put out. Adobe also doesn't need any more market dominance so I am very glad it failed.
Had to use Figma on a previous job and... yeah, there was a Hackernews story about Figma's "eng crits" and what a wonderful development tool those were, but I couldn't help but think that eng crits didn't prevent Figma from being steaming hot garbage. Clunky UI that made my (Intel) Mac's fan roar, and that was before they paywalled Dev Mode, which threw the whole team into a tizzy when it happened because corporate licensing was not prepared for that.
It's a bit selfish, but this kind of behavior motivates me against recommending good things to my peers. Whenever I like something a lot, I'm now afraid of sharing it, because the sooner it becomes successful, the sooner it will enter the enshittification phase and become worse.
As a developers i found it simpler to access css from figma via the old inspect vs. having to toggle in and out of dev mode.
It is shady to take a commonly used feature and move it behind a higher tier after years of offering to people already giving you money. Just classic VC driven startups trying to screw over its loyal customers.