The Inquirer – Friday 08 December 2006:
IT’S BECOME obvious that FrontPage is going to be quietly dropped from the Beast of Redmond’s regular user orientated offerings – only to be replaced by professional design tools. Blogging sites are replacing personal Web sites for the average PC user.
According to FrontPage’s own home page, “After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006.”
The news leaked out when an irate ISP support engineer told an INQ reader, “Microsoft has since decommissioned and no longer supports FrontPage.”
He added, “Microsoft has not supported FrontPage Extensions on Linux hosting accounts since 2002.” His suggestion was to “recommend no longer using FrontPage and utilising FTP software to upload your website.”
Finally, who uses this crap anymore anyway.
YEA!!!
I think we ALL beta tested the first version….
I think all versions were beta!
The death of FP has nothing to do with blogs. IT wasn’t a professional strength tool. The extensions are morphing into .NET and Sharepoint nd the design tool is being replaced by Expression Web Designer. About time too.
Frustration with FrontPage causes Global Warming (TM)
I own a very large design studio and have also used FP from the beginning…I have mixed feelings about Frontpage-although, until the last version, it changed code around in not so good ways (main problem), we could do our major work in DW/Flash using our more advanced and experienced designers and hand off minor client revisions etc to less expereinced personnel on Frontpage mainly because of the “Word-like” interface and IMPORTANT-the publishing section of FP was, IMHO, always better-almost bullet-proof. Juggling design for over 400 sites I have NEVER had a site crash due to FP user error and only had one site go down (due to server migration). We have had quite a few close calls with Dreamweaver and a couple of outright catastrophes because of user failure with DW, also-much more expensive overhead due to training, salaries etc. Dreamweaver creates really nice code short of hand coding, but I don’t think FP was the evil piece of crap that some people tried to make it out to be. A LOT of people would be flat out amazed at some of the MAJOR sites that have been created with it…R.I.P. Frontpage
BTW, we are BETA testing the new MS web software and it is much more advanced, creates nice code, is very MS oriented, will be fairly easy for FP guys to get into and advance buzz – that if your data services are MS-based, it kicks ass.
I personally love DW as the graphical editor of choice here but it has evolved into a somewhat bloated app as opposed to say Fireworks (another Macromedia/Adobe app) which is still quite elegant-I have used them both almost daily since v.1-
We shall see-
Just my .02 -Peace
Good maybe idiots in the work place will stop requiring experience in this stupid program.
“The death of FP has nothing to do with blogs. IT wasn’t a professional strength tool.”
I think you have a couple of misunderstandings. First, FrontPage was never intended to be a “professional strength tool.” It was a tool for novices to get websites up and running. For soccer moms and high school teachers. Not for professional webmasters.
Secondly, as the vast majority of novices (those same soccer moms) now use blogs to get their web pages out, the use of FrontPage has declined to the point where no one uses it. That’s what killed it. FP became a product without a market. (Sort of like MS Bob, WebTV, Encarta DVD, and all the other pointless bombs Microsoft innovated!)
I know it wasn’t meant to be a pro tool, but it was used that way far too often as #7 mentioned. I’ll grant that there’s no home market for it, but I bet the best parts of it are alive in Expression and Sharepoint extensions sure look like nothing more than beefed up FP extensions to me. MS is doing the right thing and morphing the product to match the market where it is being used.
Wow, does frontpage still exist? I remember being in school and wondering why people use it, you’d get way better result coding by hand.
This may make a good column for me. FrontPage was used by a lot of webmasters not just Mom’s and individuals unlike something like Microsoft Publisher. It was one of those products Microsoft bought, then quickly ruined. You are seeing the result. I, in fact, gave the original FrontPage a Dvorak Telecomm Award for its power and value. I could hardly recognize the product three years later. It was amazing to me how fast it went downhill after Microsoft bought it. This, in hindsight, may have been one of the biggest botches in the history of Microsoft – and that is saying a lot.
So should I feel guilty for using opensource WYSIWYG and FTP now? Am I the downfall of FrontPage?? I’m so sorry.
#13 – No… You are the upfall of quality web design 🙂
Jeeze… Front Page was a fine mid-level web page app. In fact, it did a few things very well.
It did a pretty good job of maintaining links and allowing includes that didn’t rely on the server.
The biggest problem with FP were the “advanced” objects that it allowed users to install into web pages. They were either poorly written Javascript, or worse, ActiveX objects.
But when used as a basic web page and site editor, it was fine.
FP’s demise is the result of being squeezed out of the market from the bottom by blogging sites, and on the top by Macromedia.
Ummm…they just renamed it to SharePoint Designer, which is being released with Office 2007. Its the same old FrontPage, just with more direct integration with SharePoint….and it still sucks!
Who needs Frontpage when you have Visual Web Developer?
Shut up kids.
Not really related to FrontPage, but reading this – especially Dvorak’s comments above – reminded me of the transition (transgression?) from Office 95 to Office 97, and beyond. It’s been a long time, but as I recall, I really liked Office 95 and especially the way the wizards worked (I mostly used Word).
Then came Office 97, and everything was all…weird. Especially how the wizards behaved.
Anyone else feel that way?
It isn’t that frontpage is gone, it is that it is being replaced by Microsoft Expression
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx
With the advent of Web 2.0 there are only a few websites using plain html pages.
I think PHP are far more superior than plain html.
Even asp scripts are running out. I hardly see them now .
Wow. I havent used frontpage in… um.. i think i may have used it once when it was initially released, mebbe – as i remember it had a lot of problems, and yer basic blog site has better tools anyway.
I am not surprised. The software compared to others with similar features was not making any headway. Personally, I had rathered use a free option over it, not solely for the price, but just the general over all feel of it for the price.posterscorner.com
Every product has its use.
What other users had against FrontPage and its simple funcionality for most was always above me.
Charles H Ferguson tells the FrontPage story in his book High St@kes, No Prisoners. Apart from making it clear that FrontPage was never intended as a fully-blown tool for the Web professional, he gives blow-by-blow accounts of doing the start-up, getting financing from VCs and finally negotiating with and selling out to Microsoft. It’s an interesting read.
hi,
I think it is right. Visual Web Developer is much better tool for a web design that FrontPage. I’ve worked with both and VWD is the best.
bye!
I’ve tried them all, DW, FP, NetObjects Fusion (now at bversion 10 – and suffering from version creep!). I’ve even tried the blogging/website tools like WordPress.
Now, what I can’t figure out (speaking as a graphic designer) is why there is this HUGE reluctance to bridge the WYSIWYG and database driven worlds?
Seems to me the only reason this hasn’t been done is because of vendor lock-in. The first business that truly innovates in this space could be the new MS/Google.
Sad fact is most WYSIWYG tools still suck at clean formatting and are often too cludgy and manual intensive to bother with.
So create a tool that lets me design a website in a WYSIWYG environment and allows me to VISUALLY make database connections and create variable fields, etc WITHOUT getting covered in SQL slop! And then like this product allow me to create an web application frontend to allow average users to update this new data-driven site!
This is do-able but unlikely given the programmer/coder snobbery and the fact that so many vendors in this space MUST LOCK-IN their users in order to maximize profit.
Frontpage was replaced by Expression Web, now available
I’m not surprised in the least to hear this. I stopped using FP years ago. I know use the Drupal platform, which is a content management system. My clients love it because of it’s ease of use, and I love it because of it’s extreme power and flexibility.
This is not new. Microsoft reported that FrontPage is about to be discontinued in February.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/02/say-goodbye-to-frontpage-and-jeeves.html
#15 and #16, Notepad++ when I’m feeling bold enough to try to code a page. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. 🙂 I’m trying to learn how to be a “neat” coder per my husband’s request and the WYSIWYG sucks at neatness I’ve noticed. Anyways.