TIL that you can “browse” the web using V.S. Code (of course) using an inbuilt “Simple Browser”¹.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open V.S. Code
2. Hit Ctrl/Cmd + P combo on your keyboard
3. Type >Show: Simple Browser and hit Enter on keyboard
4. Enter a (simple) website like https://paulgraham.com and hit Enter on keyboard

But here’s the kicker, this feature (as the name suggests) doesn’t seem to work for complex websites (like even https://google.com :O)

I’ve been able to open blog posts and that’s it. I even tried opening hacker news but it didn’t work :(

What works (for me):

• https://tnvmadhav.me
• https://paulgraham.com
• https://til.simonwillison.net

What doesn’t work (for me):

• https://google.com
• https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1928
• https://news.ycombinator.com

I believe this could be used to test simple frontend clients that serve HTML response (and nothing fancy).

If this is the only reason for this feature’s obsurity, then I can consider the reason to be personally validated.