Running a bundler/transpiler in the browser seems to be the goal in itself, but if you’re asking why that is useful: to allow developer tools to run in a browser, without a backend. Their products are dev oriented, so they can save server time this way.
This is made by StackBlitz (not really, see reply to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29812650 ) who make a Cloud IDE that runs in the browser instead of a server. As for the why of that see https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ "What about Code Spaces/Sandbox/Repls/...?
Legacy online IDEs run your entire dev environment on a remote server and stream the results back across the internet to your browser. The problem with this approach is that it yields few security benefits and provides a worse experience than your local machine in nearly every way: it takes minutes to spin up containers, is prone to network latency, cannot work offline, often results in network timeouts, debugging frozen/broken containers is nearly impossible, and hitting refresh just reconnects you to the broken container again."
WebContainers are made by Stackblitz but the link is about `browser-vite` [0].
It's made by ‹div›RIOTS [1] and it's something else.
There is a chapter in the post that compares `browser-vite` and `WebContainers` [2].
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] thread- development environment with a browser as only requirement - easily shareable development environment - fast to "boot" environment
However, as I read both pages I'm not sure what benefits Browser-vite offers over WebContainers.
[0] https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
[0] https://github.com/divriots/browser-vite
[1] https://divRIOTS.com
[2] https://divriots.com/blog/vite-in-the-browser#how-does-it-co...