Digital Web Magazine has a great article on Photoshop and Fireworks, interviewing designers who advocate one or the other.

I myself use Photoshop more, since it is what we use at work, but prefer Fireworks for my own work. I would say that I am equally comfortable in both, but just feel that for web design, Fireworks is much more optimized for laying pages out quickly. Fireworks doesn’t suffer from the feature bloat that plagues Photoshop. It’s a lightweight app designed specifically for graphics for the web. My only complaints about Fireworks–and Adobe in general–is the UI. I have not gotten a chance to try Fireworks CS4, but I’m hoping there are some great new features and improvements that will help turn some heads over to the Fireworks camp and keep Adobe developing and refining it, despite Photoshop being its flagship product.

A friend asked me recently which app he should recommend to someone just starting out in web design, and High Griffith’s answer to the first question in the article is almost word-for-word what I said:

And it depends on their experience level, since both tools can accomplish the same thing. If someone is really capable, and comfortable, working in Photoshop, then stick with it. To someone new to the industry I’d urge them to consider Fireworks—I believe that Photoshop is a tool targeted to photographers, that has some web design features, while FW has been targeted at web designers from the beginning.