> They seem to understand "IDE-in-browser" undermines their fundamental market position
How so?
They've recently rolled out the "gateway" product, which is basically a remote IDE. Sure, you still connect to that with a local one, but the local one doesn't do that much. Why not move it to a browser? The remote one does all the things people love about their IDEs. And if people don't care, they're probably not using their products anyway.
The only issue I'd have with a browser, is that I usually use Vim keybindings, which I've never seen well implemented. My favorite being the window intercepting ^W.
Gateway is a remote IDE in the browser, it's a rewrite of their front-end (Spring I think?) to marshal the UI over HTTP.
Remote is similar to VSCode. The IDE is split into a front-end and a backend: the UI stuff happens locally, and does RPC to the backend for file access, terminal, language server, what-not.
How so?
They've recently rolled out the "gateway" product, which is basically a remote IDE. Sure, you still connect to that with a local one, but the local one doesn't do that much. Why not move it to a browser? The remote one does all the things people love about their IDEs. And if people don't care, they're probably not using their products anyway.
The only issue I'd have with a browser, is that I usually use Vim keybindings, which I've never seen well implemented. My favorite being the window intercepting ^W.