I guess I'd turn the question around and ask what problems are browser based IDEs trying to solve and what advantage do they have over regular IDEs? I'm a full

I guess I'd turn the question around and ask what problems are browser based IDEs trying to solve and what advantage do they have over regular IDEs? I'm a full-time C++ developer, which probably isn't the target for most browser IDEs, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway. My perception is that browser based IDEs are inflexible, fragile, slow, and don't scale. It's not even clear to me how a browser based IDE is supposed to work in my environment. Do I clone our source repo locally and open the file from there somehow? Do I clone it to the cloud somewhere? How does a browser IDE handle the third party libraries we link to? Where is compilation done? Where does the executable go? Am I able to debug and step through the binary in the browser? What if there's a GUI component? And don't even get me started on the clunkiness of text editing in a browser compared to an editor like Emacs or Vim. The whole concept of a browser based IDE just seems like a poorly thought out abuse of web technology.