Visual Basic 6 shipped in 1998, and Microsoft stopped supporting the IDE in April 2008. Eighteen years later, VB6 Studio Web puts a working recreation of that IDE in a browser tab, form designer and all. No install, no Windows VM, no license key.
The project, from Wieslaw Soltes on GitHub, is built from plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with WebGPU drawing and a Canvas2D fallback. Soltes is a known name in the Avalonia ecosystem as the author of the Dock docking library, and this project carries the same obsession with faithful desktop UI behavior.
Soltes also has prior form here. An earlier desktop recreation, AvaloniaVisualBasic6, rebuilt the VB6 experience on top of Avalonia and credits Soltes’ Dock library as a dependency, so the browser version is the second pass at the same muscle memory, this time with no native runtime required at all.
What it actually does
It is not a mock. The IDE ships a form designer, Project Explorer, Properties pane and Form Layout window. There is a debugger with conditional breakpoints and stepping. A cooperative VM executes VB-style source through its own instruction model rather than shunting user code into JavaScript eval. It bundles 37 browser control types, an 11-project example gallery, and can export an edited project as an independent single-file HTML application that runs on its own.
The MIT-licensed repository sits at version 0.6.0 with a handful of commits, latest dated October 4, 2026, so this is early and moving fast. There is optional MCP integration, which tells you what the author thinks people will want next: an agent editing a VB6 form.
What it does not do
The compatibility doc is honest about the limits. No COM, no OCX, no DLL calls, no Windows API execution, no add-ins, and only a subset of VB6 language semantics. This is a language and IDE recreation, not a migration tool. Pointing it at a real enterprise VB6 codebase will fail in the first module that touches the registry.
That distinction matters because the installed base is real. When Microsoft ended VB6 IDE support in 2008, Gartner estimated roughly 14 billion lines of VB6 code in enterprises and put ten-year migration costs around $11 billion. Most of that code is still running, wrapped in services or pinned to old Windows versions. Nothing browser-based fixes that, and this project does not pretend to.
A short history of the thing being recreated
Visual Basic 6 was the last of its line. Microsoft moved the language to the .NET runtime as VB.NET, which was incompatible enough with VB6 source that the migration never really completed, and a decade of enterprise line-of-business applications stayed where they were. The IDE’s mainstream support ended April 8, 2008. The VB6 runtime, oddly, still ships in supported Windows versions, which tells you how many production systems depend on it.
The numbers behind that stagnation are old but still quoted: Gartner’s estimate of roughly 14 billion lines of VB6 in enterprises, with migration costs projected around $11 billion over ten years. Whatever the true figures, the shape is right. Whole categories of business software, inventory systems, order entry, small ERP, were written in VB6 by people who were not professional developers, and those applications outlived the tooling that created them.
That is also why HN threads on VB6 recreations land half in nostalgia and half in something more substantive: the form designer was, by popular agreement, one of the best GUI builders ever shipped. You dropped controls on a surface, double-clicked a button, wrote the event handler, hit F5. Three decades later most web tooling still cannot match that feedback loop, which is why low-code platforms keep reinventing it badly.
Why recreate a 1998 IDE on purpose
A browser version has practical uses beyond the warm feelings. Teaching introductory programming with a zero-setup IDE, inspecting or demoing an old project without spinning up a Windows VM, and archiving what the experience actually felt like. The single-file HTML export is a neat party trick too: a VB6-style form application that runs from one file anywhere a browser exists.
Version 0.6.0 also means expect rough edges. The repository is seven commits old, issue tracking is where the real compatibility report will come from, and a project this young can change its instruction model under your feet. Treat it as a thing to experiment with now and reassess in six months, not as infrastructure.
It is also not the only effort of its kind. Between the Avalonia desktop recreation and this browser build, VB6 form designers keep getting rebuilt by people who apparently cannot let the interaction model go. Two independent recreations in the same niche usually means the underlying itch is real, and the itch here is a RAD loop that modern tooling has failed to replace.
Try it
The live IDE runs at wieslawsoltes.github.io/VB6. Open the bundled Order Entry project, press F5, then try File, Make .html to export it as a single file. Read the compatibility doc before pointing it at real VB6 source, because COM and native API code will not run. If the form designer feels familiar in a way modern tools do not, that is the point the HN commenters keep making.