Perfect, Right?

This new Dreamweaver has one major thing going against it: an issue that has been the bane of Dreamweaver users for as long as I've been using it.

Dreamweaver continues to be a resource hog. It continues to consume large amounts of system memory. With only a few files open, Dreamweaver uses about 60MB of system memory. That's not really a big deal on today's RAM laden machines, but nonetheless, the program is a RAM gobbler all the same. Eclipse, for example, it uses much less RAM with just as many files open. I realize that's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but still... 60MB?

That said, Dreamweaver 8 is most definitely worth the upgrade. The feature set is nice, and the stability is good. There's really nothing about this latest version of Dreamweaver that isn't attractive. If you're a developer, you'll be pleased to hear that, with version 8, Dreamweaver is finally a tool that's worthy of a developer. If you're a designer, it's still a great design tool, made even better by its much improved CSS handling functionality, which makes it that much easier to design a cross browser compatible, CSS enabled web site with very little effort. It definitely helped traverse my own CSS learning curve. If I were a movie reviewer I'd give Dreamweaver 8 two thumbs up!