I've been using Firefox and Jetbrains for about a decade. Firefox is currently using 0.8% CPU while streaming music in another tab. The only speed difference between it and Chrome is that Chrome will prefetch pages in the background, which appears to make it faster on clicks. However, even were it much slower than Chromium alternatives, I would never give up my fully functioning uBlock Origin.
But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.
More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.
It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.
But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.
More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.
It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.