NetBeans had been struggling to get perceived as more than an also-ran next to Eclipse and later IntelliJ long before it was handed over to Apache.

For Java development, I struggled with every IDE other than IntelliJ. It just seems to get more things right and can ingest and work with things like Gradle vs Maven, Spring Boot, decompiling 3rd party jars for debugging if you don't have the source, running a Windows UI driving a project that's inside WSL, etc. It's expensive, but worth it enough that I've paid for it when a company would not.

Yup, compare this to the awesome "New and noteworthy" posts that Eclipse publishes for each new version: https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.25/jdt.php

This is also probably a reflection that NetBeans is a project on fast path to extinction.

The sad part is that before Apache takeover they had pretty decent website that put all the features and screenshots to the front:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160708090748/https://netbeans.... https://web.archive.org/web/20160708091639/https://netbeans....

Why did they waste time redoing it into something so useless is beyond me.

Because all of that was owned by Oracle and they didn't grant it to Apache.

There are countless companies running bizarre internal applications written using the NetBeans interface builder and I know for a fact they will never migrate away from it. It's certainly the also-ran of Java IDEs but 'extinction' is a little hyperbolic.

That "fast path" has been over 20 years long. That's an incredible amount of time for a software development tool.

I mean, netbeans was on the ascent at least as recent as 10 years ago, but then intellij stole their thunder, and eclipse held onto a core userbase more so than netbeans did.

Heh…I remember attending a Java dev conference in 2006 where attendees thought the mention of using NetBeans for professional development was a joke. Like the presenter prefaced a statement with, “if you use NetBeans…” and he wasn’t able to finish the sentence over the noise from the whole room erupting in laughter.

It has literally been a joke for at least 16 years.

Right before I came to the comments here I just failed in a search to find a summary of the most significant changes of this NetBeans version. This has happened to me on previous versions in the past as well - you have to either read the exhaustive list of changes on their github page, or get lucky and find some 3rd party blog that condenses it down for you. Why doesn't Apache write that blog themselves? Or have they and I just didn't stumble across it?

The NetBeans page does not even say what it is.

https://netbeans.apache.org/

"Development Environment", "Fast & Smart Editing", "Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, CSS, and More"

yes it does?

All those call to actions are the bare minimum I'd expect of an IDE, nothing gives a unique selling point.

> It highlights source code syntactically and semantically, lets you easily refactor code, with a range of handy and powerful tools.

That's table stakes. Otherwise it's just notepad.

IntelliJ has me scroll down the page, but I then get a breakdown of what USPs IntelliJ thinks I a developer would be interested to know about, like it's refactoring and code completion, that it has specific integrations for frameworks. Testimonies, and new features are listed on that page. Not buried elsewhere.

VSCode, immediately shows that it's USP, it's extensions ecosystem, in the screenshot on the landing page and then covers some other minor USPs in brief segments.

Even Sublime Text, updated once every blue moon when Mars is in retrograde, understands that showing off USPs and the developer experience is key.

Now I used Netbeans for years, but only because I was exposed to it in the university computer labs. I've only had to go back to it to fix a JavaFX app we got landed with, and I can't say I was too impressed at how well it integrated with maven, having to ditch out and use the command line to get proper bundled builds to work.

The home page is almost identical since 2020 and it was slightly worse in 2018. Very impressive.