Comment by LanceH

There were a couple things going on in 2003.

First, it was quite common for a company to buy a developer the exact same corporate standard computer as everyone else. So lots of computers had limited ram to run things like J2EE, Lotus Notes, and Eclipse at the same time. It was painful.

The startup was always slow because it preloaded everything. This was a deliberate choice to not load things and interrupt the developer. Just don't close it all day and the experience was very good.

A plus compared to the standard of the day was that it ran native widgets. So doing something as simple as opening a file explorer to browse through your project was considerably faster than comparable IDE's at the time.

Personally, I loved the customization which was dialed all the way up. I could have multiple windows with different arrangements of panels within them, all saved. I haven't run across anything as configurable since then.

It also had the big benefit of their plugin system which shined when working with multiple languages in the same project.

It always felt to me like it became trendy to crap on Eclipse because of the slow startup time and it never could shake that.