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VS Code for the Web - Bringing VS Code to the browser

Microsoft has released a preview of VS Code for the Web. Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you'll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser. Open a folder on your local machine and start coding. No install required.

With the availability of vscode.dev, The Visual Studio Code team has begun to finally realize our original vision of building a development tool that can run fully serverless in the browser, no virtual machine or container needed.

Modern browsers that support the File System Access API (Edge and Chrome today) allow web pages to access the local file system (with your permission). This simple gateway to the local machine quickly opens some interesting scenarios for using VS Code for the Web as a zero-installation local development tool.

Since VS Code for the Web is running completely within the browser, some experiences will naturally be more constrained, when compared to what you can do in the desktop app or codespaces. For example, the terminal and debugger are not available, since you can't compile, run, and debug applications within the browser sandbox yet.

Extensions such as themes, key maps, and snippets all work in vscode.dev and you can even enable roaming between the browser, the desktop, and GitHub Codespaces through Settings Sync. More extensions will be compatible as authors update them to make use of vscode.dev & GitHub.dev.

vscode.dev also offers support for GitHub and Azure Repos (part of Azure DevOps) built-in.

Should you want more features like a terminal or debugger you can move to codespaces at any time.

GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces allows you to develop entirely in a cloud environment with up to 32 cores. Using Codespaces a integrated development environment (IDE) built around Visual Studio Code on GitHub that can be accessed from a web browser, Visual Studio Code, or using SSH.

GitHub Teams and GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers can use Codespaces today in a free trial until 10 September 2021 after which billing will apply and you will be billed for storage and compute usage on a Pay as you go basis. Codespaces was released on the 11 August 2021.

But for GitHub Free or GitHub Pro users Codespaces is currently in limited public beta and is free to use during the beta no general availability has been announced yet for this group of users.

You can develop in your Codespace directly in Visual Studio Code. By connecting the Visual Studio Codespaces extension with your account on GitHub or you can use a browser-based editor.