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Yeah, this.

The analogy seems clear to me: The web is to IE as git is to VSCode, eh?

At the very least, it makes it harder for an editor to be a competitor to VSCode w/o integrating with GitHub (not just git) now, eh?

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It’s telling that they went with VScode and not Atom. Makes me wonder what the long term outlook for Atom is.

Not really. At least: the web happened well before IE was introduced as an answer. In contrast, VS Code was invented much later than git which at the time was an established technology and in some ways a standard.

The other context here is that IE was a competitive browser in its time: 1998-2001. The problem is that it won and then languished. IE had a lot of sway over how developers built things as the market share grew. Then it locked in users in various ways which starved the other competitors.

It took until Phoenix (now Firefox), for there to be something better that grabbed the attention of developers and those sick of being stuck with IE. It became Firefox and Mozilla hatched a pretty effective plan to steal market share. For all of Mozilla's recent failings, we forget (or weren't around to remember) the success of Firefox was pretty impressive as it was a grassroots effort.

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