[charliebwrites]

> It is a vs code fork

Google may have won the browser wars with Chrome, but Microsoft seems to be winning the IDE wars with VSCode

[thanhhaimai]

VSCode is based on Chromium. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/v...

[dragonwriter]

VSCode is Electron based which, yes, is based on Chromium. But the page you link to isn't about that, its about using VSCode as dev environment for working on Chromium, so I don't know why you linked it in this context.

[lokimedes]

Which is based on Apple Webkit? The winner is always the last marketable brand.

[vovavili]

I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term in the dev-oriented space.

[btown]

I strongly disagree.

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.

[whynotminot]

It’s kind of a meme to dunk on Electron, but here’s it’s been for years.

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.

[Miraste]

VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.

[SR2Z]

Electron apps will win because they're just web apps - and web apps won so decisively years ago that they will never go anywhere.

[jshen]

It's been winning for a while

[Aurornis]

The anti-Electron meme is a vocal minority who don’t realize they’re a vocal minority. It’s over represented on Hacker News but outside of HN and other niches, people do not care what’s under the hood. They only care that it works and it’s free.

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.

[verdverm]

why? I don't have a problem with it, building extensions for VS Code is pretty easy

Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach parity

[pjc50]

What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?

[no_wizard]

What’s long term exactly? Between VSCode and previous winners Brackets and Atom Electron has been in this space in the top 5 for 20 years already.

I think the ship sailed

[alexfromapex]

Care to explain why? I like Electron but I've switched to Tauri because it feels way faster and more secure.

[TZubiri]

It's like those recipes for yogurt.

In order to build a web app, you will first need a web app

[mrweasel]

I wouldn't bet on Google product for anything long-term.

[wnevets]

Even if those devs are vibe-oriented?

[_harsch]

its hold the market for over 10 years tho... i wished zed would've not been under gpl

[cyberax]

15 years ago, every company had its own "BlahBlah Studio" IDE built on top of Eclipse. Now it's VSCode.

Meanwhile, JetBrains IDEs are still the best, but remain unpopular outside of Android Studio.

[throwaway2037]

    > remain unpopular outside of Android Studio

What a strange claim. For enterprise Java, is there is a serious alternative in 2025? And, Rider is slowly eating the lunch of (classic) Visual Studio for C# development. I used it again recently to write an Excel XLL plug-in. I could not believe how far Rider has come in 10 years.

[philipwhiuk]

And IntelliJ

PyCharm’s lack of popularity surprises me. Maybe it’s not good enough at venvs

[WD-42]

I just checked and I don’t even have the JVM installed on my machine. It seems like Java is dead for consumer applications. Not saying that’s why they aren’t popular but I’m sure it doesn’t help.

[harrall]

In the grand scheme of things, Microsoft had always spent more money on developer tooling than most other companies, even in the 90s.

Hence even the infamous Ballmer quote.

[AstroBen]

In user numbers, maybe. JetBrains is far ahead in actual developer experience though

[aDyslecticCrow]

I wouldn't underestimate Eclipse user statistics. That may sound insane in 2025, but I've seen a lot of heavily customized eclipse editors still kicking around for vendor specific systems, setting aside that Java is still a pretty large language in its own right.

[catlover76]

At best, that's subjective, but it's fact that JetBrains is comically far behind when it comes to AI tooling.

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.

[pstuart]

Developers, developers, developers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

[stefan_]

I see the VSCode management has been firmly redirected to prioritize GitHubs failing and behind "AI Coding" competition entry. When that will predictably falter expect them to lose interest in the editor all together.

[WD-42]

VSCode IS chrome though.

[recursive]

Kind of like how Android is linux.

[alansammarone]

I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very, very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a performance review. And even if that was part of the metric, people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".

neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.

[dabockster]

> 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.

[smikhanov]

> I don’t know what IntelliJ is.

“I never read The Economist” – Management Trainee, aged 42.

[Sharlin]

The IntelliJ family are probably the best IDEs on the market currently.