I assume their goals are similar to the "WebContainers" project [0] they link to.

- development environment with a browser as only requirement - easily shareable development environment - fast to "boot" environment

However, as I read both pages I'm not sure what benefits Browser-vite offers over WebContainers.

[0] https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/

This is made by StackBlitz (not really, see reply to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29812650 ) who make a Cloud IDE that runs in the browser instead of a server. As for the why of that see https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ "What about Code Spaces/Sandbox/Repls/...? Legacy online IDEs run your entire dev environment on a remote server and stream the results back across the internet to your browser. The problem with this approach is that it yields few security benefits and provides a worse experience than your local machine in nearly every way: it takes minutes to spin up containers, is prone to network latency, cannot work offline, often results in network timeouts, debugging frozen/broken containers is nearly impossible, and hitting refresh just reconnects you to the broken container again."

Running a bundler/transpiler in the browser seems to be the goal in itself, but if you’re asking why that is useful: to allow developer tools to run in a browser, without a backend. Their products are dev oriented, so they can save server time this way.

To power their products mentioned in https://divriots.com/#what-we-do

100% agree. No idea what the why was.