Not sure about PS, but even this circa 2001 version of Fireworks blows Gimp out of the water in terms of ease of use and basic image manipulations.
Macromedia Fireworks was a raster editor like Photoshop, but was heavily geared towards "web graphics" (think: Adobe ImageReady). It had neat features such as text templating, integation with Dreamweaver, and decent sub-pixel positioning. I used it from 2001 until 2005. I felt it was primarily for making websites using now-obsolete techniques like tables-for-layout, spacer.gif, and using heavily manually-optimized graphics and techniques to achieve effects that CSS was not yet capable of. I may be wrong, but I don't believe Fireworks changed much since the Adobe acquisition, ensuring its declining relevance in the post-CSS3 web world.