Short answer: Adobe (and their Photoshop) is pretty much the reason Fireworks never got better traction. Longer answer: Fireworks was originally a Macromedia

Short answer: Adobe (and their Photoshop) is pretty much the reason Fireworks never got better traction. Longer answer: Fireworks was originally a Macromedia product. Back when it was released, from what I recall, it was in fact getting some pretty reasonable traction: in many folks eyes, it was a good upcoming web graphics tool, by the folk who made Flash (which actually had many fans back then). It was cheaper than Adobe's Photoshop, and addressed a different use case, and in those cases it certainly had better workflow. Then Adobe acquired Macromedia. Fireworks pretty much got back-seated, most probably because Adobe already had a flagship 2d/photo graphics editor. A tiny handful of Fireworks' features made it into Photoshop. And Fireworks got a small amount of integration with the rest of the Adobe suite. But Adobe never really promoted Fireworks. And AFAIK they simply never put any resources (developers) into Fireworks.