12/10/2023
A few weeks back, Google came out with something called Project IDX.
And what exactly it did, I wasn’t really too sure.
The website that was supposed to provide details about what it was, was honestly kind of hand wavy.
Didn’t dive too much into the details.
IDX Google
But I recently just got off of the public beta Waitlist and I’ve been able to use it, poke around a little bit and give my initial thoughts on what exactly it is and actually have a better idea of what makes it different from what’s already out there.
So what is Project IDX ?
is it is a web-based development environment where the entire development environment is hosted on Google cloud servers.
So essentially on the screen you have a Vscode like editor because it’s actually Vs code powered, more into that in a little bit.
And then behind the scenes, you actually don’t run any of the computation, you don’t run any of the software on your machine.
Instead, it runs on a server that is hosted by a virtual machine that Google owns.
So theoretically, it doesn’t matter what type of laptop you have, whether it’s the most high-end MacBook Pro or like the cheapest little laptop that you can ever possibly find.
As long as you have an Internet connection as well as an internet browser, you can run theoretically any type of code that you want without any performance issues.
Because once again, the code is not running on your computer, but rather a cloud-hosted computer.
In this initial launch, it seems like it has a pretty deep integration with Google’s development offerings such as Flutter and Firebase.
There are dedicated tabs for Flutter and Firebase on the left-hand side, but it also supports other modern web development frames as well for full-stack web applications like Next, JS View, React, all the Greatest Hits.
And then on top of it all, rather than using GitHub Copilot as an AI model to help you code, it instead has Google’s Palm AI built into your code to help write is
So it finally seems like this is Google’s first step into trying to get deeper into the developer ecosystem, trying to compete with Microsoft.
Because Microsoft is kind of owning the developer landscape right now.
They own GitHub, they own Vs code, which is probably the most popular code editor out there.
I believe they also own NPM.
Or GitHub owns NPM.
And now that they own GitHub, they own that.
Microsoft also created TypeScript as well.
Whereas with Google, their popularity amongst developers has not been that great.
Angular and Flutter are nowhere near as popular as React.
And then the language that Google developed, which is Dart, is nowhere near as popular as TypeScript.
As you can see, they are losing a lot of ground…… read more on my website 👇👇👇👇
what is Google Project IDX, it is a web-based development environment where the entire development environment is hosted on Google cloud servers.