[1][2][3] MarsEdit was originally developed by Brent Simmons[4] as a component of NetNewsWire, a popular news aggregator for Mac OS X, which, in the 1.0 series, included a simple weblog editor.

[18] Version 2 received a 4 out of 5 star review by Macworld magazine,[19] while Ars Technica's David Chartier said it lacked ecto's support for Amazon affiliate links and the built-in Mac OS X Media Browser.

[20] In 2007, Engadget's Scott McNulty called it "fantastic" in comparison to Blogger's web interface,[21] and Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng described it as a "popular blogging tool among Mac users".

[23] Weighing the need for MarsEdit compared to using Tumblr's web interface, Christina Warren said that the lower risk of data loss (through saved drafts) and the ease of writing long posts made the app "superior".

[24] Macworld praised the new WYSIWYG features version 3.1, but noted that there was missing documentation for self-hosted Movable Type blogs.