We have seen Photoshop work in a browser, and it looked pretty good. "Streaming Photoshop" is Adobe and Google's plan to bring the incomparable photo editor to Chrome OS and the Chrome Browser. We covered the original announcement, but we were recently given the chance to talk to Adobe about the project and see it actually working in a Chrome browser.

"Streaming Photoshop" is a Chrome App that you download from the Chrome store (provided you are whitelisted). The app opens in a window that looks just like a local version of Photoshop—there's no browser UI of any kind. Photoshop lives on a computer in the cloud, and a video feed of it is streamed to the Chrome app. The app captures clicks and sends them to the server. It sounds like using it would be a clunky mess, but the whole process looked indistinguishable from a local install of Photoshop.

The primary purpose of Photoshop-in-a-browser is to get the app running on Chrome OS, which pretty much can only run a browser. Chrome OS has taken off as a competitor to Windows—the NPD's last estimate put it at 35% of commercial notebook sales—but it lacks a few killer apps like Photoshop. The other benefit is that you can now run Photoshop on just about any computer without having to worry about RAM and CPU usage, since all the computer has to display is a video stream. Adobe says even the $200 Chromebooks on the market today should be fast enough to handle Streaming Photoshop.

What you will have to worry about is your bandwidth. Three to 4MB/s will get you the best results, and Adobe says Streaming Photoshop should still be usable on connections as slow as 1MB/s. There's no offline support, of course. If you want that, you'll need a Windows or Mac computer and a normal version of Photoshop.

We're a little concerned about the fidelity of the video stream, as even Adobe's press images have artifacting in some spots, like the white-to-red color picker in the first shot.

The slowest part of the app was the startup, which took about eight to ten seconds to launch—though Photoshop's startup time has always been a lengthy process. Adobe says it's still tuning the speed of the remote computer and isn't sure what the final specs will be. It makes you wonder what Photoshop would look like if it was designed to run on the nearly infinite power available via the cloud. We immediately began to think of things like instant filter previews or Adobe designing even more complex algorithms for our photos without having to worry about how long they will take to process on a local machine.

Streaming Photoshop runs version 15.2.1 (the latest version) on a Windows box from Google Compute Engine. That means you'll be getting the Windows title bar and menus regardless of what your host OS is. The app will remap hotkeys, though, so other than a few minor visual differences, it shouldn't feel too weird. Right now there's no GPU support, so things like 3D functions are currently off-limits—the whole menu was grayed-out. There's also no way to print directly from Photoshop.

Storage used Google Drive—it does not currently work with Creative Cloud—and if your file is in Google's cloud, it opens instantly, no uploading required. We'd imagine most people have their Photoshop files backed up 24/7 in Creative Cloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive, so this shouldn't be a big change for most people. Adobe says Creative Cloud support is coming, but for now, on Google's platform, Drive support comes free.

Streaming Photoshop looked like... Photoshop. That's probably the best praise you can give it. We still have some areas to uncover in regard to performance—it's hard to tell how it's dealing with things like ping time when you aren't the one clicking, but what we saw looked good. Adobe isn't trying to rush this out the door. Streaming Photoshop is currently in a "pilot" program aimed at education users, and Adobe says it still has about six months of testing and feedback to gather before it is ready to move past the pilot stage.