Did you know RStudio’s IDE runs on a web browser?!

I am taking the Exploratory Data Analysis class on Udacity which uses R and RStudio to visualize data.

I noticed if you right click when using RStudio, you are presented with the option to “inspect.” What opens up is something strikingly similar to Chrome’s web inspector,

Intrigued, I googled RStudio to learn more - and sure enough, it was running on Chrome!

I came across this support page from RStudio which talks about optimizing your browser to run RStudio. And this blog post by Joe Cheng who worked on RStudio. From the post,

We’re trying to make R a better language by giving it a better IDE … [RStudio is] a full IDE - it just happens to be in a browser.

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What you see when using RStudio is generated by HTML and CSS! And you can play around with RStudio in much the same way as a random website!

Using the inspector to change a table cell’s color,

Wondering what a “web inspector” is? Checkout this awesome tutorial from Code School →