I really hope they decide to move away from a browser based solution. I have personally toyed with the idea of making a web based IDE for front-end development, and had came across so many issues in my "experiments" that I decided it wasn't worth it.

Lets talk about editors..

CodeMirror/Ace as an editor.

While both Code Mirror and Ace ( A spin off from Mozilla's Bespin editor ) Have done a very good job, as Marijn Haverbeke ( Code Mirror author ) puts it, of "In-browser code editing made bearable". Neither are smooth / fluid / responsive enough for every/all day coding. If you read

http://codemirror.net/doc/internals.html

You will get a good sense of why the browser is a very harsh environment for a code editor to adapt to.

Alternatively you can have a play with any one of the tools, that use Code Mirror and Ace.

Try to use them for an extended period of time and you will see what I mean.

    http://jsbin.com ( Code Mirror )
    http://c9.io ( Ace Editor )

I love the concept, and I'm going to be making a donation either way. I just hope that they move away from the idea of a browser based editor. Before investing a huge amount of time and energy into it, and end up with an inferior product, largely attributed to the platform it's running on.

As a front-end developer, I'm all for making as much as I can browser based / cross platform, and pushing the limits of the browser. But from personal experience the browser isn't the place to be writing the code to do it.