A fork by more people than just gitlab is going to be easier than a reimplementation created only by gitlab.

1) It is a product that exists, maintenance is easier than building from scratch in this case.

2) a consolidated effort by many people in maintaining a fork will allow much more effort than gitlab alone can spend.

3) mindshare on how vscode works already exists externally, a new webIDE doesn't have the same level of developer mindshare anyway.

As a paying gitlab customer I'd rather their money be spent on things that actually matter; reimplementing open source tools does not matter.

And ? Should every company yak-shave to satisfy FOSS zealots ? Where does it stop ? Is running Gitlab on Windows a problem ?

Let Gitlab focus on git repositories, project management and devops. Everything else is just a pure waste of time.

>OP is literally Gitlab admitting they can't build a competitive web editor.

Or they've just decided it's not a good use of their finite resources?