Well, consider me not surprised: Update about Edge Tools and Services. If you have no idea what this is about, then I'm not surprised. A few years ago, Adobe released an incredible set of web tools called the Edge suite. This included a responsive design tool (Edge Reflow), a web animation tool (Edge Animate), a mobile testing tool (Edge Inspect), and an editor (Edge Code), a 'branded' version of Brackets. Brackets was already on life support* (Update from the Adobe Brackets Team) so it isn't too surprising to see the rest of the web related stuff get killed off as a well.

Again - not surprising - but certainly disappointing. The Edge tools were incredibly cool. Small, light-weight, useful to both developers and designers alike, and a big change from what Adobe normally did. I loved talking about them to audiences and it was a great initiative, especially along with the rest of the stuff Adobe was doing regarding to web. I can remember attending conferences and hearing folks in the web community praise Adobe - typically with a bit of surprise - for what they were doing to help people working on the web.

A lot of good will was earned - rightly so - and it has simply been thrown away. Truly disappointing. I'm sure there were valid business reasons for this - developers especially are pretty cheap - but I think there is value in good will that can be (almost) as good as profit.

  • To be fair, Brackets isn't on life-support, just a temporary hiatus. But development has slowed down quite a bit. Personally, performance for me has been really bad (but it may just be the extensions I use as I don't see others having the issues I do) to the point where I switched to Atom, and then Visual Studio Code, and I've had much better luck since then. Every time a new version comes out I check it out, but I pretty much only use Brackets now when I need to fix a reported bug with one of my extensions.