It looks like they are really only putting a web frontend on top of eclipse, so all the computation heavy stuff happens on the backend and gets sent back to the browser asynchronously. In other words, it should work as fast as the desktop eclipse (minus latency issues).
I can imagine some developers not liking some aspect of that. But there are a lot of people sitting at their desks, putting in their 8 or 10 or whatever. And if you're outsourcing, suddenly you're giving the contractors access to a web page and only the components they're working on, rather than the whole shebang.
I think I'd find it kind of / rather frustrating, but it wouldn't be the first work environment to generate those feelings.
Isn't this already doable? Just make separate binaries for the sections you want, all you need to distribute are the interfaces (header files, etc) to build against. Whether companies actually do so or not is a different issue entirely, and yes, something simpler may increase its use, but I fail to see how this would actually change anything but frequency.
I used the word "contractors", but I could also apply the description to direct employees located in different countries.
This also keeps the source from being located (other than a page at a time, as it were) in those jurisdictions. (Also, potentially, sensitive test data.)
My experience may have been an anomaly, but after tackling duplicate systems and builds, attendant source control issues, latency in rich client development tools, blah, blah, there was a growing push to bring everything back and keep it "on the mothership". One step was having people essentially remote in to local hosts via Citrix.
Webification was happening initially for project management tools, but eventually, if they could give everybody web pages and be done with it (except for those directly maintaining the infrastructure), Management and IT would have been very happy.
A lot of these aspects may be, initially at least, "big company" problems. But my -- admittedly limited -- perception is that, in those environments, they are on a lot of people's radar.
(I'm suddenly reminded of the recent tussle that IBM went through with the Russian government, to ensure that they could use encryption/security IBM deemed sufficient/necessary on development environments for developers located in Russia.)
Given what we've come to expect from an IDE these days (think IntelliJ or VS.NET + ReSharper), it's tough to imagine a browser-based version being all that compelling. I've actually worked for extended periods using a browser-based editor while traveling, but it really wasn't that pleasant. I don't think I'd consider doing it if I was sitting at my main dev box.