Thank you for saying what this entire blog post doesn't. It's actually disrespectful of Google to launch this without even a mention of the fact that it is based on VSCode.
Well, Kate has been around as an KDE based advanced text editor for nearly 2 decades now - its base feature set isn't too different from a base VS Code installation. And there's also KDevelop as a more full featured IDE.
It's a good point, and in fact I went and looked at the original announcement of VS Code and it appears that Microsoft didn't credit Chromium or Electron back then either. I guess big companies are allergic to crediting other big companies.
> given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way
Has there been any indication that these folks are "rubbing Google the wrong way"? I think Chromium, as a project, is actually very happy that more people are using their engine.
It also feels like they couldn't use the GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY logo enough times in this blog post. Gigantic image with the logo and a subtitle, plastered over and over again.
I no longer bother reading their press releases. I'd much rather read the comments and threads like these to get the real story. And I say that as a former googler.
It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much as possible.
VSCode isn't a Chromium fork, it's an Electron app. Utilizing something is different than making a derivative of it. For example, an empty "Hello World" Electron app wouldn't have any value for an app developer, but creating a web browser derived from Chromium means you've already finished 99.9% of the work.
Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.
Yes, madness. VS Code wasn’t developed entirely by Microsoft. It uses plenty of other open source libraries. Why is it that VS Code should be acknowledged but not the underlying V8 engine, or Chromium, or WebKit or KHTML?
Stallman said that in 1997 there were 75 acknowledgements in a single piece of software. With today’s trend of micro libraries on npm, there will be at least thousands of acknowledgements in one piece of software.
Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.
They have the revenues to support all of this.
They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.
They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.
We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.
This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.
a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.
Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.
Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved a problem they also caused.
(presumably because if they touch the ad system it might break)
> a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.
You mean like web search, webmail, internet ads, maps, calendars, browsers, smartphone operating systems, online document editing, and translation? I mean, I'm not even including stuff they acquired early like YouTube. Google was the most feared company for a decade or more for a good reason: they absolutely devoured competition in what were thought to be mature markets.
Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.
Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.
The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors.
You love a Google product because of its features but never actually because of the product itself. But you can’t win everything by engineering and sometimes Google struggles with the product side.
I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word processor.
It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to consolidate their dominance.
> Plaintiffs maintain that Google has monopoly power in the product market for general
search services in the United States.
> According to Plaintiffs, Google has a dominant and durable
share in that market (general search), and that share is protected by high barriers to entry.
> Google counters that there is no such thing as a product market for general search services.
> What exists instead, Google insists, is a broader market for query response.
(+ yes obviously, products like Sheets or Maps were amazing, and are still very much the best.
It was a joke to say that even Google denies its own success, the same way as the earlier comment).
As somebody who worked on two IDEs which didn't fork VSCode but still used Monaco for code editing views, I think forking VSCode is almost always the right solutions for a new IDE. You get extensions, familiarity and most importantly, don't waste valuable time on the boring stuff which VSCode has already implemented.
Nothing bad with using code other people made open. Our whole industry is built on this.
forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.
Because if they're just an extension they're stuck with whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no stranger to using this leverage against others.
Because there are plenty of good reasons why you may want to modify/extend the code and the look and feel beyond what an extension would let you do.
I never understood why people scoff at VS Code forks. I'd honestly tend to be more skeptical of new editors that don't fork VS Code, because then they're probably missing a ton of useful capabilities and are incompatible with all the VSC extensions everyone's gotten used to.
Just the Eclipse legacy and development approach perhaps. Eclipse is 24 years old and its codebase stems from VisualAge before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic. Probably the most successful thing built on OSGi, though I dont imagine Theia brought any of that along.
At least for a while, Eclipse seemed like an Architect Astronaut's happy fever dream: actual bits if implementations hidden behind 5 to 10 nested interfaces and facades wherever I looked. I remember that at one point that I wanted to debug some weird behavior in the Plugin Development Kit and after sinking about half a day into exploring the source code, I didn't even see a single line of code that was actually doing anything meaningful. It was quite shocking to my old junior level self.
I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies would invest in it's development, we would have alternative to VS Code.
Interesting that they include non-Gemini models. Both Claude and GPT oss are both on Google Cloud, so I assume that Antigravity is using GC as the provider and not making API calls to Anthropic or OpenAI.
I tried writing a native Windows app using WinUI 3.
I wasted a day on trying to get some PNGs to render correctly, but no matter the config I used, the colors came out wrongly oversaturated.
I used Tauri with a WebView, and the app was rendering the images perfectly fine. On top of that the UI looked much better, and I was done in half the time I spend trying to fix the rendering issue in WinUI 3.
Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc. It's unfortunate that things are so inefficient now, but competition is good, and native platforms can get good.
I'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than Google.
Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc, it matters less.
> Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc.
... Aren't we talking about a programming IDE here? When did mobile become anything like the primary market for that? Are people expected to sit around for hours inputting symbols with an OSK?
Making a VSCode fork is probably the wrong direction at this point in time. The future of agentic coding should need less support for code editor related functionality, and could eventually primarily support viewing code rather than editing code. There's a lot more flexibility in UI starting from scratch, and personally I want to see a UI that allows flexible manipulation of context and code changes with multiple agents.
GitHub is building a UI like this. I like it. I sometimes need the full IDE, but plenty of times don't. It's nice to be able to easily see what the agent is up to and converse with it in real-time while reviewing it's outputs.
