2 years ago

Microsoft continued its march toward developer dominance this week with the launch of Visual Studio Code for the Web, a lightweight version of the company’s highly popular (mostly) open source code editor that runs fully in the browser. Now, before you go getting too excited, VS Code for the Web isn’t really a fully-functional version of VS Code running in the browser, as it has no backend to back it up, which means its primary purpose is for client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS applications. Since VS Code for the Web is running completely within the browser, some experiences will naturally be more constrained, when compared to what you can do in the desktop app.

That is, VS Code for the Web is able to provide syntax colorization, text-based completions and other such features for popular languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, Rust, and Go, while TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python are “all powered by language services that run natively in the browser” and therefore provide a “better” experience, while those aforementioned Web languages, such as JSON, HTML, CSS, and LESS, will provide the best experience.

Inspired by GitHub1s, github.dev/vscode.dev put the web workbench of VS Code in the browser without access to compute,” Landgraf wrote.