Updating Dreamweaver ever again?

Hi @jmcmetal,

Thanks for writing to us and conveying your kind thoughts. We released Dw 21.5 update in the month of May'25 and will recieve updates in case of any user critical issues on OS platforms.

Have a pleasant day!

Regards,

Nayan

Dreamweaver Team 

Development of Dreamweaver is static.  No new features are being added, except essential security updates.

Use it alongside other tools that are in active development.

CODE EDITORS:

-- Bootstrap Studio -- https://bootstrapstudio.io/

-- Codespaces (free, browser-based) - https://github.com/features/codespaces
-- Notepad++ (free) - https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
-- Nova (Mac only, formerly called Coda) - https://nova.app/
-- Pinegrow - https://pinegrow.com/
-- Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/
-- Visual Studio Code (free) - https://code.visualstudio.com/
-- Wappler ~ Visual Web App Builder - https://wappler.io/
============
ONLINE SITE BUILDERS:
-- Squarespace - https://www.squarespace.com/
-- Webflow - https://webflow.com
-- Wix - https://www.wix.com/
-- WordPress (open source) - https://wordpress.org/

Hope that helps.

As others have stated DW struggled in the past when technical aspects of web development went in a deep tech direction and that was combined with the no-code CMS solutions that have seen a rise in the opposite direction. As creatives and coders are typically not one and the same most solutions solve for one use case or the other. If there's a direction that best suites your use case or needs, the community may be able to help offer recommendations for a best course of action.

As Ben hints at, DW has been in a state of steady decline since 2012. In 2020, Adobe announced that the program would be left in a minimum development status. Basically the only things they plan to update are potential security holes and OS compatibility issues. They also said they would update the third party libraries included in the program, but they're woefully behind on a good number of them, to the point where it's basically not worth it anymore. No bug fixes or new features are planned going forward.

I pretty much stopped any kind of web development with DW once they removed the direct downloads for CC2015, the last version before Brackets took over for the Code View.

It's being kept on life support for the current userbase. I assume once the subscriptions/downloads hit a pre-determined low, they'll pull the plug completely. Until then, view it as the free web program that comes with a full subscription. There's zero reason to ever pay for a single program subscription to it at this point.

There is no replacement from Adobe in their current suite of software and nothing has been mentioned, or even hinted at, taking over for it.

It's disappointing to say the least.

Dreamweaver is on the verge of becoming obsolete. The signs were evident as early as 2012, when features were being removed rather than improved. Currently, Dreamweaver suffers from dangerously outdated PHP and an antiquated version of Bootstrap. Fortunately, I transitioned away from it in 2017 and have never regretted the decision.