It’s ideal for bitmap graphics and much easier to use than Photoshop/ImageReady for the same. It doesn’t handle layers the same way as Photoshop and it’s easy to just grab and move stuff right on the artboard without choosing a layer first. Since Adobe swallowed Macromedia, I’m sure the better features of Fireworks will be sucked into ImageReady and it will got the way of Freehand.
I like it and use it whenever doing a regular old HTML site. It plays very nice with Dreamweaver. Draw the whole think in fireworks, including rollover states in secondary layers, slice it up, tell it what is not an image, and it will write the whole page for you. I don’t typically do this, but if you’re not great at html, it does the trick very well.