That's interesting - I didn't know Notepad++ still ranked so high. Oddly enough, I'm actually pretty acutely aware of how much performance matters in this spac

That's interesting - I didn't know Notepad++ still ranked so high. Oddly enough, I'm actually pretty acutely aware of how much performance matters in this space - at my last job, I spent a year developing an IDE for a custom in-house language/environment with some unusual required features. I looked in to extending existing editors/IDEs. The web-based editors were too slow for my application (which required a very large number of page updates from remote sources) but extending the native editors was an unfathomable pain. When I looked into things that didn't use a browser back-end, I was budgeting a month just to learn enough about their plugin architectures to determine if what we needed was possible without rewriting the UI code from scratch, which I really wanted to avoid. From experience, working with raw Java/C++ UI toolkit code is a nightmare compared to html/js and requires orders of magnitude more LOC just to put anything on the screen that can be interacted with. In the end, I wrote my own web-based IDE from scratch, using a lot of application-specific performance optimizations that would be really difficult for a more generic, modular system (lots more care about what parts of the DOM to touch and when went directly into the parser than would have been possible with Atom/VSCode/CodeMirror/whatever at the time). I spent 6 months optimizing it and it was only barely fast enough that you could type at close to 60fps in big documents, but I don't think I could have made a native version that worked at all in that time. So I get it: performance is important, and there are cases where web-based things either don't cut it or are barely acceptable. My point wasn't that performance isn't important, it's that it's not the only concern and pointing to the relative popularity of editors over time still illustrates that. Notepad++ was released 12 years before VSCode (which has only been around for ~3 years) and has had better performance this whole time, but in the 2018 Stack Overflow survey, VSCode beats it in popularity. So performance can't be the overriding factor in its relative popularity - it became popular in spite of being slower than things that already existed. The author of the original piece argues that the whole web-stack is _wrong_ and should be thrown out and replaced with something else, because it's slow and people don't care about how easy it is to develop something if it's slow. I don't think that's true, and the easiest way to see that is to note that we already had faster things that were harder to develop and extend and they're increasingly being rejected in favor of the opposite.