Roumen asks this question in his blog when he talks about the evolution NetBeans has made, as compared to that of Eclipse. “There are some features in Eclipse which prevent people from switching to NetBeans. If I investigate such reasons today compared to what I saw a year ago, the list is much smaller and lots of developers acknowledge the progress NetBeans has made. Lots of developers have also made the switch.”

Roumen believes that both IDEs are comparable, although NetBeans has better initial experience and is better integrated into a single product. “There are for sure areas where Eclipse is better, but the NetBeans team is focusing on improving these areas - the main theme of NetBeans 6.0 are killer editing features and support for other languages.”

He says that NetBeans is much better than Eclipse in many areas such as GUI building, profiling, mobility development, enterprise and web development, collaborative development, etc. Nevertheless, times are changing, he says. “Given the speed of evolution of NetBeans I dare to ask: will NetBeans 6.0 be an Eclipse killer? If we can create a better editor with main focus on increased productivity, keep improving the traditionally strong features, nurture the plug-in ecosystem and create all the packs from Sun's IDEs (Creator Pack, Enterprise Pack, C/C++ Pack) - I am sure it will be.”