Adobe Muse

» see adobe.com/products/muse as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

adobe muse launched in may 2012 as a wysiwyg website builder for designers who refused to write html. the canvas felt like indesign. you laid out pages with grids and master spreads. widgets for menus and sliders dropped in from a panel, and you exported a static site. for designers fluent in adobe's print tools but allergic to code, this was the offer they had been waiting for.

the offer did not hold. by 2014 responsive design was the floor and the rest of the web was building in flexbox and the early days of css grid. muse generated fixed-pixel layouts wrapped in absolute positioning, which is to say it built websites that looked exactly like the canvas and behaved exactly like a print layout dropped into a browser. when responsive came along, muse bolted on alternate layouts for different breakpoints, but the underlying output was still the wrong stack for where the web was going.

muse was not for me. i write code, and the muse pitch was specifically the part of the website-building category that did not. it sat in the same room as iweb and frontpage already on this site, three different attempts to sell layout tools to people who did not want to think about html.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried ~

adobe was making a real bet with muse. the indesign muscle in print design was huge, and adobe wanted that audience to publish on the web without learning a new mental model. for the first two years muse moved fast. there were updates every few weeks. a community of muse-only widget shops grew, and a small market appeared for muse template marketplaces. for a print-design boutique that needed a brochure site for a client, muse was a real shortcut.

~ the long tail ~

adobe announced the end on 26 march 2018. development stopped. new site purchases stopped on 18 june. existing sites kept working but the editor sat frozen on whatever feature set it had. technical support ended exactly two years later on 26 march 2020. adobe pointed users at dreamweaver, which was the same tool muse was supposed to replace for the no-code crowd. squarespace and wix were the actual replacement for the audience muse had courted.

the muse files survive on hard drives. some agencies still open the application to maintain a legacy client site, since the build tool keeps running on whatever os version it was last compatible with. the.muse file format is closed and adobe never opened it. when an agency drops a muse client, the site has to be rebuilt in another stack from scratch.

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