Please Adobe, wake up and restart development on Fireworks!

[BestDigital]

I finally upgraded to MacOS Big Sur only to find that my go-to program for web images and graphics is finally dead! It is not supported on Big Sur. And abandoned by Adobe.

Fireworks is an app that should never have been abandoned, bitmap and vector seamlessly integrated on one app without the clunky, bloated workflows of Photoshop and Illustrator, why would you throw it away? It doen't make sense. Why that app, you have so many tiny apps now, for so many specific niche jobs, why not web graphocs? Neither Photoshop nor Illustrator are anywhere near a usable replacement for what Fireworks could do.

Sure, it was showing it's age, but if you'd kept up development beyond CS6 it would have, it could have top-line support for working with SVG, and all the other great advances in web graphics, since you abandoned it.

Please, Adobe, wake up, stop shoving the bloated, unsuitable Photoshop and Illustrator down our throats for web graphics, and start up Fireworks again.

[Nancy OShea]

Thanks for your feedback but nobody from Adobe is monitoring this space anymore, sorry. 

FW is officially discontinued and unsupported.  It's not coming back.  It's also unrealistic to expect 10 year old 32-bit software to work on a radically new OS that only supports 64-bit apps. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/kb/macos-big-sur.html

OPTION 1: Find an old computer that can run 32-bit legacy apps and never upgrade it.

OPTION 2: Use modern software that's compatible with Big Sur and beyond...

[Paul-M]

Fireworks works perfectly fine on Windows 10 - the problem is Adobe's licensing software that they have clearly decided they won't bother fixing for CS6 products even if they are included in the Creative Cloud Suite.

[BestDigital]

OPTION 2: Use modern software that's compatible with Big Sur and beyond...

By @Nancy OShea

You're right.
Fireworks is dead, long live Affnity Photo!
Can't do everything that Fireworks could do but can do 95% of it ,and do it so much better than any current Adobe product. Works really well on the desktop with a mix of bitmap and vector assets, and can easily click and select assets directly on the desktop without having to revert to finding the layer. It's really good. Rcommended as a great substitute for Fireworks for anyone looking for one. The whole suite of products is great.

[Paul-M]

Affinity is missing some basic features and the main gripe with their customers is the lack of transparency and a roadmap, Designer/Photo don't even have a basic non destructive perspective tool (Designer doesn't have o the tool at all and the one in Photo isn't a proper non destructive tool), they don't have a propert export preview either, they have an experimental version which is not really there yet) ... I could go on with more missing essentials, People have been asking for some of the missing basic features for years and if you look on their forum you'll see there is no repsonse from people at Affinity. So while they'll software is very good value when you consider the price (and they seem to have a 50% off offer on quite often) there are still some core features missing that Fireworks users will find fustrating..

[rik ed]

Hear hear. Well put.

[Paul-M]

Parallels Desktop seems to be the go to solution for people wanting to run Fireworks on Catalina or Big Sur ... Bear in mind that people are now having issues with the licesning aspect of Fireworks on Windows and having to do silly workarounds.

If you're not happy to use Photoshop consider these alternatives:

Photpea - web based app that is a bit of a Photoshop clone, it can open layered Fireworks PNGs
Affinity Designer - available for Mac and PC - about the nearest thing to Fireworks. If you buy all three Affinity apps (Publisher, Photo and Designer) you can take advantage of somehting called Studio Link which combines all three apps into one platform.

[BestDigital]

I have Affinity Designer and like it, but looking for something where
vector shapes and bitmaps live next to each other happily! Didn't know
about the 3 apps into one approach, could be good, but does mean 3
licenses for 1 app!. Might give it a try, though.

I tried PhotoLine, but can't get it to open.

GIMP but it's clunky and the vector shapes just aren't there.

[Paul-M]

Yes, if you get Affinity Photo, Publisher & Designer you can use something called Studio Link that effectively brings all three Affinity apps into one platform, so you get all the Photo bitmap editing, live filters etc of Photo, vector editing of Designer along with some Publisher features like pages which Fireworks users will like....

[rayek.elfin]

One glaring major issue with Affinity is that its web export does NOT provide a preview which is updated according to the export settings. This is really a glaring workflow issue, and still not addressed.

It effectively makes Affinity unsuitable for exporting optimized web/screen images.

[Paul-M]

Yes, the Affinity software has some shortcomings at the moment...

[Paul-M]

actually there is an export preview in Affinity, but the window is small-ish but it does give a  live preview if you play about with jpeg compression for example

[Paul-M]

If fact I'm wrong ... you can resize the preview window, so size is not a a problem...

[rayek.elfin]

I am aware that Preview feature exists. It was added in 1.9 as a stop-gap measure to appease Affinity users with at least something while waiting for improvements in the export persona.

Unfortunately, that preview window is almost useless, because when it is zoomed in & out (ctrl-scroll wheel) it blurs the pixels. It also does not stay put and it has not controls whatsoever. It cannot be compared directly with other versions or even the original version.

Even the developers have stated that this "feature" is only a test or a temporary option.

[Paul-M]

Didn't really noticing any pixelation when I tested