Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Current use of Dreamweaver today

  • Several commenters still use Dreamweaver, but mostly in narrow roles:
    • Updating or maintaining legacy personal or client sites.
    • Using old perpetual versions (e.g., Dreamweaver 8) under Wine or on older systems.
    • As a convenient FTP client, template editor for WordPress, or for advanced multi-file find/replace and HTML table generation.
  • There are anecdotes of institutional/legacy use:
    • A school library system on an air‑gapped Windows XP box using Dreamweaver + FileMaker.
    • Hearsay (explicitly unverified) that some government sites still depend on Dreamweaver licenses.

Perceptions of quality and role

  • Strong disagreement over whether it was ever “professional”:
    • Some say it was essentially a toy, mostly for students and hobbyists, with poor code output and weak support for modern workflows.
    • Others report it being used as the primary tool in agencies and real jobs, including classic ASP, PHP/MySQL CRUD apps, SharePoint themes, and image maps, arguing it was powerful for its era.
  • Consensus that today it’s ill‑suited for modern JS‑heavy frontends and that subscription pricing makes even less sense for small static sites.

Successors and modern alternatives

  • For non‑technical users: Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress are seen as having absorbed Dreamweaver’s market (“edit button” over HTML editor).
  • For designer‑dev workflows:
    • Webflow, Bootstrap Studio, Pinegrow, Wappler, Coda/Nova and various WYSIWYG/CMS tools are named as successors or partial replacements.
    • Some still use Seamonkey Composer, Kompozer, and older tools like HomeSite.
  • One view is that Tailwind + code editors replaces the need for visual layout tools for many developers.

Nostalgia and learning impact

  • Many learned HTML/CSS, MySQL, and early web dev through Dreamweaver (often pirated copies), reversing from WYSIWYG to source view; some credit it with starting their careers.
  • Strong nostalgia for the broader Macromedia/Adobe era (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, ColdFusion, etc.) and the sense that tooling then made basic CRUD and page design simpler than today’s stacks.

Related tangents: Flash and HTML editors

  • Flash’s demise sparks debate: some blame Apple’s iOS policy, others Adobe’s security/performance failures; some miss Flash’s capabilities, others are glad to see its ads and battery drain gone.
  • Several note how hard it remains to build good WYSIWYG HTML editors, despite modern open‑source browser engines, and lament the poor HTML output of tools like Word and email clients such as Outlook.
  • Speculation appears about a “new Dreamweaver” built around Figma, React components, and LLMs, but it’s seen as complex and commercially risky.