A thought experiment if you have time for it: Let's say you take a word processor. It's a great word processor, well-designed for its purpose. But it's primarily designed for "consumer" text editing, things like resumes, school papers, and the like. And let's say you add some programmer specific functionality to it, but do it in a way that doesn't interfere with any of the consumer-first features. E.g., you make it automatically syntax highlight source code files, you make it use a more sophisticated find-and-replace when editing these files, you add a file drawer that you can toggle via two levels in the menu bar, etc...
Would you be interested in using this word processor for programming over your text editor or IDE which is designed first-and-foremost for programming? If not, what's the difference between this and the way Chrome treats developers? (I'm not being disingenuous here, I honestly don't see the difference personally.)
If I really liked that word processor for general use then I might also use it for simple one-off programming tasks, like how I use my browser's developer tools today (Firefox though).
What's the alternative though? Is the suggestion that browsers ought to be competitive out of the box with whole off-the-shelf IDEs that can cost thousands of dollars, prioritizing that use case over even web browsing?
I wasn't suggestion browsers should compete with IDEs, just that consumer browsers and developer browsers should be different applications with different features, just like word processors and text editors are different applications with different features.
Regarding the word processor experiment, I don't really mean as something you'd use for one-off programming tasks, I mean as a replacement for a dedicated programmer's text editor. E.g., the point is that a developer-first browser could have features and developer-experience that consumer-first browser can never match, just like adding developer features to a word processor would struggle to match a dedicated programming text editor.
Would you be interested in using this word processor for programming over your text editor or IDE which is designed first-and-foremost for programming? If not, what's the difference between this and the way Chrome treats developers? (I'm not being disingenuous here, I honestly don't see the difference personally.)