After announcing the end of the Creative Suite and a new family of Creative Cloud-only apps and services, Adobe has shared that its Web-focused design and prototyping tool Fireworks has been canned.
There had been whisper that Fireworks would soon cease development, and now, after being ignored during the company’s Max conference today, Adobe says it has “decided not to update Fireworks to CC and instead will focus on developing new tools to meet our customers needs.”
The core reasoning behind this change, according to Adobe, is the overlap in functionality between Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow. This decision is hard to vet without seeing Adobe’s sales and usage numbers, but there is clearly a strong, niche market for Fireworks — perhaps too niche for Adobe’s own aspirations.
Fireworks CS6 will continue to be available, as will the entire CS 6 suite of apps, but Adobe is only planning to offer “security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes.”
So, have you heard the one about Fireworks being killed? Nope not a joke. Missing @alanmusselman
— Dee Sadler (@DeeSadler) May 6, 2013
The small, yet sincerely dedicated group of die-hard Fireworks fans will surely be disappointed — we wouldn’t be surprised to see a petition surface demanding Adobe open source the product for future development.
This announcement follows massive news for Adobe: After nearly 10 years, the company is abandoning its Creative Suite to focus solely on a new suite of Creative Cloud-only apps and services. For details on why Adobe has made this decision, head here.
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