Google may have won the browser wars with Chrome, but Microsoft seems to be winning the IDE wars with VSCode
> if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
Probably nowhere, people rather not do anything that contribute to something that does decisions they disagree with. Forking is beautiful, and I think improves things more than it hurts. Think of all the things we wouldn't have if it wasn't for forking projects :)
How so?
Do you think thousands of googlers and apple engineers could be reasonably managed by some KDE opensource contributors? Or do you imagine google and apple would have taken over KDE? (Does anyone want that? Sounds horrible.)
Chromium is an upstream dependency (by way of Electron) for VSCode.
WebKit was an upstream dependency of Chromium, but is no more since the Blink/WebKit hard fork.
Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
Even more importantly, though, the more we move towards "I'm supervising a fleet of 50+ concurrent AI agents developing code on separate branches" the more the notion of the IDE starts to look like something you want to be able to launch in an unconfigured cloud-based environment, where I can send a link to my PM who can open exactly what I'm seeing in a web browser to unblock that PR on the unanswered spec question.
Sure, there's a world where everyone in every company uses Zed or similar, all the way up to the C-suite.
But it's far more likely that web technologies become the things that break down bottlenecks to AI-speed innovation, and if that's the case, IDEs built with an eye towards being portable to web environments (including their entire extension ecosystems) become unbeatable.
The last thing I want is to install dozens of JS extensions written by people who crossed that lower barrier. Most of them will probably be vibe coded as well. Browser extensions are not the reason I use specific browsers. In fact, I currently have 4 browser extensions installed, one of which I wrote myself. So the idea that JS extensions will be a net benefit for an IDE is the wrong way of looking at it.
Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually. There are plenty of editors and IDEs that don't have as many users as the more popular ones, yet still have an enthusiastic and dedicated community around them.
The most successful IDE of all time is ed, which is enthusiastically used by one ancient graybeard who is constantly complaining about the kids these days.
Nobody has told him that the rest of the world uses 250MB of RAM for their text editor because they value petty things like "usability" over purity. He would have a heart attack - the last time he heard someone describe the concept of Emacs plugins he flew into a rage and tried to organize a death panel for anyone using syntax highlighting.
People dunk on VS Code but it’s pretty damn good. Surely the best Electron app? I’m sure if you are heavily into EMACS it’s great but most people don’t want to invest huge amounts of time into their tools, they would rather be spending that time producing.
For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for developing almost anything straight out of the box, it within minutes after installing a few plugins, it’s very hard to beat. In my opinion lot of the hate is pure cope from people who have probably never really used it.
It’s part of the furniture at this point, for better or worse. Maybe don’t bet on it, but certainly wouldn’t be smart to bet against it, either.
VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for XCode.
It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line, saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your pelican case.
So? No excuse for a poor interactive experience.
No way that is true. In fact, it's the opposite, which is the exact reason I use VS Code.
> the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones
It's still kinda slow for me. I've moved everything but WinForms off it now, though.
JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans…
VS Code does well with performance. Maybe one of the new ones usurps, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.
VS is much faster considering it is a full blown IDE not a text editor, being mostly C++/COM and a couple of .NET extensions alongside the WPF based UI.
Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, written in JavaScript, to see where performance goes.
I used Visual Studio Code across a number of machines including my extremely underpowered low-spec test laptop. Honestly it’s fine everywhere.
Day to day, I use an Apple Silicon laptop. These are all more than fast enough for a smooth experience in Visual Studio Code.
At this point the only people who think Electron is a problem for Visual Studio Code either don’t actually use it (and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about) or they’re obsessing over things like checking the memory usage of apps and being upset that it could be lower in their imaginary perfect world.
Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach parity
The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare.
When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents.
And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish.
Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.
I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:
- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB
- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB
update:
I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js.
Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.)
Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good.
But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
(I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
I think the ship sailed
In order to build a web app, you will first need a web app
Meanwhile, JetBrains IDEs are still the best, but remain unpopular outside of Android Studio.
> remain unpopular outside of Android Studio
In my current company, only I am using IntelliJ IDEs. Other people have never even tried them, except for Android Studio.
PyCharm’s lack of popularity surprises me. Maybe it’s not good enough at venvs
If there’s a workflow I’m missing please let me know because I want to love it!
Hence even the infamous Ballmer quote.
They have a chance to compete fresh with Fleet, but they are not making progress on even the basic IDE there, let alone getting anywhere near Cursor when it comes to LLM integration.
Have you actually given them a real test yet - either Junie or even the baseline chat?
neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.
It started as a modernized Eclipse competitor (the Java IDE) but they've built a bunch of other IDEs based on it. Idk if it still runs on Java or not, but it had potential last I used it about a decade ago. But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
As a person paying for the jetbrains ultimate package (all ides), I think going with vscode is a very solid decision.
The jetbrains ides still have various features which I always miss whenever I need to use another IDE (like way better "import" suggestions as an easy to understand example)... But unless you're writing in specific languages like Java, vscode is way quicker and works just fine - and that applies even more to agentic development, where you're using these features less and less...
- This isn't a scientific approach.
Java's big strength is that it's a memory safe, compiled, and sandboxed low level platform with over a quarter century of development behind it. But it historically hasn't handled computer graphics well and can feel very slow and bloated when something needs that - like a GUI. That weakness is probably a big reason why Microsoft rewrote Minecraft after they bought it.
> But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
Also, with the advent of wildly modern JVMs (11+), the JIT process is so insanely good now. Why cannot a GUI be written in Swing and run on the JVM?
“I never read The Economist” – Management Trainee, aged 42.