A browser is much easier to use. Every computer has a browser and no place blocks said browser. This means that when you're not near your dev machine, you can easily use another machine to log on, regardless of what software it has and which ports are open. As a bonus, you get a fullblown IDE with all your serverside dev tools (Node or Rails etc) ready to go, without any configuration or installation of packages.
For a concrete use case: my dev laptop broke down in the midst of a project, and I could just use a generalpurpose computer at location, use c9 to spin up a server, clone the git repo and I had an IDE to go with. Did not need to wait for the sysadmin to let me access a terminal or to unblock certain ports. No loss of productivity whatsoever, I was up and running in minutes.
Also, I can give others access to said c9 workspace, and they don't need to know anything besides the programming language used, to make little tweaks.
> A browser is much easier to use. Every computer has a browser and no place blocks said browser.
I think I just realized how much lasting trauma the browser wars caused me. You're completely right, but my gut still reflexively respond: I know you have a shiny thing that works great in Internet Explorer, but those ActiveX controls won't run in Opera on Linux...
Rebuilding trust in the web as an application platform is going to take some force on will on my part...
(That said, I have grumpy reservations on the security of our current and future web - but I guess it's not really worse than what it was like when people were running Windows 3.11 and running random code in spreadsheets on a samba-share...)
For a concrete use case: my dev laptop broke down in the midst of a project, and I could just use a generalpurpose computer at location, use c9 to spin up a server, clone the git repo and I had an IDE to go with. Did not need to wait for the sysadmin to let me access a terminal or to unblock certain ports. No loss of productivity whatsoever, I was up and running in minutes.
Also, I can give others access to said c9 workspace, and they don't need to know anything besides the programming language used, to make little tweaks.