If you hadn't post this comment, I would have.

Fireworks could have been Figma, it could have been the default platform every designer used. But Adobe didn't understand it, they saw it as a weird Photoshop competitor and shelved it.

The last few versions bundled with CS were clearly neglected maintenance releases. I finally stopped using my slowing rotting copy in about 2014 when I got a Mac with a retina screen and fireworks was stuck with a terrible pixel doubled ui. :-(

I held on until 2020. At some point I had to give up MacOS updates to keep it going.

I still haven't found an acceptable replacement, choosing instead to design in-browser with CSS. Of course this means I can't make graphic heavy designs that I can slice and export with transparent PNGs, but we haven't cycled back to that sort of design yet so I'll be OK with minimalist crap for a while.

Fireworks came with the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite (I had the education version -- ~$299 was the happy medium for me between full price and pirating). While I made great use of Flash and Dreamweaver in that bundle, Fireworks was always an enigma. I think it exported some animated gifs for me. What did y'all make with it?

Allaire Homesite anyone?

It was a sad day for me when it got bought and integrated into Dreamweaver.

Homesite was amazing. I consider it the first real text editor that I've ever used. And I hated Macromedia for killing it.

Agreed! Built my first e-commerce site with Homesite and Coldfusion in 1996.

fireworks is still the best 2d graphics design system I’ve ever used.

I used to make a non-insignificant amount of rasterised computer “art” using fireworks, its discontinuance (and the fact that photoshop was not at all a replacement) killed that for me.

HotDogPro changed my life as a kid and was a big part in my learning to code and understand the web, files and creativity.