Just read an interesting letter in this months edition of .net magazine, very relevant to the way this discussion has gone...
Having read your review of Fireworks CS4 and the response to your last reader's letter in issue 180, I feel the need to try and point out how wrong your coverage has been.
Now don't get me wrong, Photoshop is amazing and is nigh on perfect for manipulating images. However, it's merely OK when it comes to web design, Fireworks on the other hand, is perfect.
I've been using Fireworks and Photoshop for about 10 years. I've convinced every one of my workplaces how much easier it makes it to put your site together and get working prototypes designed in a fraction of the time. One company took less than 30 minutes ti make its mind up to get copies of Fireworks for every designer, as I could use symbols and colour search/replace to do in 10 minutes what was taking over an hour in Photoshop,
If you're putting together a site, there seems to be a host of features Photoshop doesn't provide. In Fireworks you can create dynamic buttons (and see how they'll roll and move live on the page), search and replace colours, resize objects with nine-slice scaling and easily name slices. In fact, almost any tedious web design task is made easy.
What Fireworks is no good at is image manipulation. It has the basics and can be used for quick fixes, but get your photographic images corrected in Photoshop. Use them as symbols in Fireworks and you can even quickly get your amended Photoshop images into your project in a couple of clicks.
Some people seem to think Fireworks was for an age where websites were built with sliced tables, but it has so much more to offer, CS4 also looks like it might finally have a decent looking interface.