For those that use LLMs in a similar manner to a search engine the Anthropic team (unlike Meta AI and Google Gemini) have made it easy to use Claude from right within your browser. In Firefox add a bookmark with the following values:
Yes, I'm aware of @gemini on Chrome. If you look at how it's implemented they are purposely stashing the query into a HTTP header so it's not possible to use a simple bookmark to launch it.
This doesn't seem to work for me. I'm getting "%s" as the initial prompt, even though the text is properly displaying in the URL. Almost seems like an issue on the Claude side.
Oh I agree, but this is definitely not it, I don't understand why Anthropic released this, other than squatting the same keyboard shortcut the ChatGPT app uses, with no ability to change it :P.
I do see value, but the Claude app is just a webview with a keyboard shortcut, I don't even think it has voice dictation, I uninstalled it immediately.
Hmm yes, I don't see any issues giving a corporate controlled model with the operational precision of a coin toss full access to my entire system. There is absolutely nothing that could ever go wrong.
Nah but seriously, can we start a counter of how many times a chatbot agent has deleted someone's system32 because it was trained on data of the average tech forum?
I don't think they could release computer use for $20/month plan. It seems super expensive and you could easily involve Claude for hours of work for manual tasks like data entry or data cleaning.
yeah, that's what it seems like. As of today, there's no additional features I notice compared to having a Safari-based desktop version of this (which I uninstalled to install this one).
It's disappointing that these companies are perfectly happy to use it for their own wealth creation strategy, but have no interest in giving back and furthering the ecosystem.
The whole electron app uses less RAM than the page opened as a PWA? That’s surprising to me, how come? I somehow thought Safari was more memory efficient than Chromium
Tangentially, what are people using to have a unified interface to query multiple LLMs? Juggling multiple apps or websites for each provider gets annoying. I was using openrouter but the chat history is only stored in browser, so I'm looking for something else now. I tried open-webui[1] and that looks pretty good but I wonder if there are better alternatives.
There are a ton of alternatives if you search around. I created my own because I wanted something keyboard centric, and use OpenRouter with it: https://github.com/iansinnott/prompta. They all accomplish roughly the same thing though.
Try MultiGPT which is a Chrome extension that consolidates several AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard, Claude, and more, into a single interfacee
They add the same Option+Space (on macOS) shortcut that ChatGPT has, but the app feels a bit like a quick build overall, as it's just a web container. Hopefully they'll add some nice features that wouldn't work in a browser such as asking about what's on your screen or a shortcut to be able to speak questions and get a voice response.
Kids these days insist that they need the "app" of something, even when it's literally the exact same thing as the webpage.
Between this phenomenon and the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers, I can't help but wonder if a huge percentage of the populace have never heard of or used Bookmarks on their web browsers before.
I'm not a kid and I know about bookmarks, but I prefer using apps to apps in my browser. Electron apps I have less interest in, but I really don't like working in something like Figma (which is in the top of it's class) in the browser.
In-browser apps do all sorts of clunky things like going back a page because I'm trying to scroll right or left or hotkeys not working. Native apps feel so much better to use and I can close my browser and stay focused on the task.
I think it’s less about not knowing what a bookmark is and more about just having a more direct way to access it, where it’s more high-level than just in a tab. There’s just something mentally different about opening a program from your dock as opposed to from a tab, even if they’re both basically a website.
This line of reasoning was why I was hopeful that PWAs on the desktop would become first-class citizens, as far back as Mozilla Prism[1] in the late 2000s. They never really did seem to take off.
It used to be fairly common to have web-page shortcuts back in the mid-00's. Lots of apps would add spam shortcuts to your desktop that would just open your web browser to a web page where you were encouraged to buy something/donate/start a free trial.
Anyways I think that capability still exists on all modern OSes.
I swear if all the ai chat apps started as fat apps and then Claude just released the first port to the web, I would be reading this exact same comment on hacker news except complaining that there was nothing wrong with the fat app.
I like to ALT-TAB instead of CTRL-TAB because I always have fewer applications open than I do sites. I don't have dozens and dozens of tabs always open either, but always more than my programs.
I have ChatGPT app and Claude and Gemini PWAs on my dock. I gravitate towards using ChatGPT much more. It's just faster vs launching Chromium for each small query.
Please, tell me where I said there's only one way to do things.
My question was not meant as a critique of people who know what they're doing. I'm not talking about engineers or sys-admins like the typical HN crowd, I'm talking about the population at large. The average person understands their devices just enough to get them to work the way they want. It stands to reason that a fairly large percentage of the modern population, used to using apps for every individual service, may never have had a use for browser bookmarks and may therefore never have even attempted to use them.
I have a few friends who work as professors and tell me stories about how their students don't know how to navigate a filesystem in Windows. Why would a person like that, for instance, have bothered to learn what a bookmark is vs just keeping a tab open?
I was thinking more about people who use Tree Style Tabs and have nested Tab folders and such when I wrote that part. It's simple enough to save an entire session as a bookmark folder, to open an entire folder of bookmarks as new tabs (rather than needing to hibernate tabs to save ram while still keeping them "open"), and to search through bookmarks ad-hoc. Bookmark folders can be infinitely nested, categorized, ordered by when you were looking (though searching through your browser history also works for that), combined, copied, pasted, moved, put into or removed from the bookmark toolbar.
It's an incredibly flexible system that allows for a massive variety of workflows and it feels like people just keep finding ways to recreate it, but worse: less platform-independent, eating more system resources, dependent on third-party plugins, or (in the case of using an app for everything) eating up orders of magnitude more storage space at rest.
The web went to shit a long time ago; you can't rely on being able to bookmark a site and then go back to where you were. Half the sites are infinite scroll, or dynamically generated pages, or SPAs[1], or some other ephemeral invention du jour. Keeping a tab open gives you some chance to return to where you were for some time; bookmarks are just giving up.
--
[0] - At least until the browser decides to screw with you and unloads the tabs you needed. Firefox on Android is particularly aggressive at that, which incidentally makes PWAs unusable, too.
[1] - You're lucky when those let you make a bookmark that won't drop you back to index page when loaded.
There isn't one, it's just an Electron app that opens slower than the webpage and flashes white before it appears.
You'd think, a company that has such powerful AI and no restrictions on requests to it would be able to bash out truly native apps no rather than something that looks quite shoddily made, like making your electron app not flash white when in dark mode is amateur level stuff.
Lots of people are correctly suggesting this could function just as equally well as a PWA, but I will point out that (all things being equal) there are some valid use-cases when strictly choosing between Electron vs PWA that a LOT OF PEOPLE seem to be oblivious of:
- Electron apps don’t rely on a web server to function, so as long as you archive the app’s installer, you can install it on future computers even if the original website goes down. This assumes that the PWA/Electron App in question doesn't need server features, for example Photopea, Obsidian, etc.
- A bit easier to block network traffic to/from a dedicated application from a privacy perspective. Still can be done on a PWA, but it's trickier to set up.
It would be nice to see a de-coupling of the backend (as a service, deamon, etc.) so that we could choose the desired frontend of our choice (net win from a UI/UX, accessibility perspective, etc.), but it's been a long time since I've encountered a consumer level application that did this.
I mean, re: point 1, we're talking about an app that calls an API for every interaction already, so that doesn't seem super relevant. If Claude is down, you can't use it whether it's through a PWA or an Electron app.
> "Lots of people are correctly suggesting this could function just as equally well as a PWA, but I will point out that (all things being equal) there are SOME VALID USE-CASES"
YES - I am speaking GENERALLY. That's why I literally called that out in my comment that this particular use-case (Claude Desktop) could easily be done with a PWA.
Gotcha. Sorry, I guess that was unclear to me based on your phrasing. When you said "some valid use-cases", I thought perhaps you meant (for this app) and not (for Electron apps in general) as the implied next clause.
No worries, yeah I just meant that if a dev has no intention of building a native app and is only deciding between either a PWA or an Electron/Tauri App, then there are some advantages to the latter.
I'd say for the case of Tauri it's doubly so. You can have natively compiled Rust code for especially compute-intensive functions, rather than having it running via WASM.
Indeed not everyone is able to write Web sites with good performance across multiple browsers, that is 3l1t3 skill, better ship Chrome alongside the application.
More like 400MB, and the problem isn't that I can't spare it. The problem is that I can only spare 400 MB a few times at most before it starts becoming an issue.
I have stuff to do on my computer, stuff that often involves multiple programs (one of them almost always being a browser!). Then there's bunch of support stuff that I want, or have to, keep around. A music player, an IM, a mail client, etc. When everything gets packaged as Electron apps, even those tiny utilities add up quickly, and everything slows. down. Or worse, gets starved for RAM and starts stuttering (Windows) or just gets OOM-killed (Linux).
And I say that as a dev/techie, who has plenty of RAM. Non-tech people tend to have computers that are memory-starved by default. Building trivial stuff as Electron apps, where native would be 100x less resource-intensive, is just peak developer laziness/selfishness.
It's more like 400MB due to how they're packaged. And when you could have it run with 10x to 20x less RAM, it just scream "we don't care about you". Not everyone have 64GB RAM and 22 cores of CPU in their laptop.
It's like using a semi-truck (with the trailer attached) to go buy groceries 100 meters away.
I'm unsure where I'm supposed to look. In the Task Manager, the app I created (Video Hub App), when running, is routinely between 40MB and 120MB under the "Memory" column. Are you saying there is RAM use tucked away under different row than the app name?
It's not for the storage or ram space. It's for being inefficient which always making me doubt about the company culture. If you want native capabilities so much, just build a proper software for the platform. If VLC and Calibre can do cross platform, you can do it too.
I was surprised that simple things like sharing a chat in Claude doesn't seem to be there. I read somewhere that it was a feature that was disabled later.
It's annoying, I'd really love to export my chats. Any Anthropic PMs reading this, as a paying subscriber I command you to prioritise this feature, on pain of failed training runs
I like LibreChat a great deal, but its pretty heavy-weight (over a more bundled solution like Jan) in terms of spinning up a bunch of docker containers (meilisearch, mongo, vector db, etc.)
This LLM hype is out of control, they literally bullshit on any novel input (admittedly there's not a lot of this) and are wrong 15-20% of the time for all inputs
This isn't a "we'll just add more context", "we'll just add more instructions and params", "our multi-head transformers will auto-attention the tits off your query" etc - this is search based on probability maps. It is structurally unable to be intelligent, no matter how many models you chain together and how much compute you throw at it. But it can sure mimic that shit, which is why LPs are going to lose their shirts and GPs are going to struggle to raise follow on funds.
For those that use LLMs in a similar manner to a search engine the Anthropic team (unlike Meta AI and Google Gemini) have made it easy to use Claude from right within your browser. In Firefox add a bookmark with the following values:
- Name: Claude AI
- URL: https://claude.ai/new?q=%s
- Keyword: ai (or whatever you'd like to use as a shortcut)
Now from the URL bar you can type: ai <my question>
For ChatGPT use https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s as the URL and for Microsoft Copilot use https://www.bing.com/search?showconv=1&sendquery=1&q=%s.
This is not unique to FireFox. This is also possible in Chrome (Settings -> Search Engine) and looks like this:
https://imgur.com/a/qxap6iI
Setup the way I have in the image you can simply type @claude and your search
Worth noting that Gemini also offers a URL shortcut for searching Gemini via @gemini within the Chrome browser.
Yes, I'm aware of @gemini on Chrome. If you look at how it's implemented they are purposely stashing the query into a HTTP header so it's not possible to use a simple bookmark to launch it.
This doesn't seem to work for me. I'm getting "%s" as the initial prompt, even though the text is properly displaying in the URL. Almost seems like an issue on the Claude side.
worked fine for me on google chrome by setting it up as a search engine/site search.
if your "desktop app" gives me a cookie consent banner, i'm going to assume it's a pretty lazy effort to have a desktop app.
i can click the "install page as app" button in chrome myself, thanks.
A desktop app that renders a website can still be useful if it exposes native APIs to the website.
On the flip side, the ChatGPT desktop app is native on Mac and it's buggy and feature-incomplete compared to the web version.
100% - amazing this crap get released when "Add to Dock" is far better - zoom, copy/paste, search, font size - all works just like in normal browser.
Amazingly both implementations burn 100% CPU when rendering text, which is just bonkers.
Claude's web app crashes after few days and uses 30% on idle.
I only use the chatgpt desktop app for quick throwaway interactions.
For anything more involved, I want a tab and an URL. Perfect use case for a webapp, native is pointless for this, especially if it's just a webview.
Native desktop apps give these companies access to more system-level functions which will be super useful for...
- Voice dictation / interactions
- Agents accessing other applications and controlling your desktop
- Agents performing background tasks like continuous monitoring, periodic data processing, or ongoing analysis
I would expect to see these kind of features start to take off next year
You're not wrong, but I'm willing to guess the biggest reason is: Analytics
You can also do a filesystem scan pretty easily. Both for useful features, as well as spying.
That requires user to accept permissions (which lately macos giving so many popups made me fatigued and accept everything)
Oh I agree, but this is definitely not it, I don't understand why Anthropic released this, other than squatting the same keyboard shortcut the ChatGPT app uses, with no ability to change it :P.
The shortcut can be changed. Open the app settings from the menu bar, or the usual Command-, shortcut, and it's the only setting they expose.
By not it, do you mean those features aren’t available yet, or you don’t see the value in them?
I do see value, but the Claude app is just a webview with a keyboard shortcut, I don't even think it has voice dictation, I uninstalled it immediately.
Also data mining! :)
> - Agents performing background tasks like continuous monitoring, periodic data processing, or ongoing analysis
Who said that this was to help the end user!
Hmm yes, I don't see any issues giving a corporate controlled model with the operational precision of a coin toss full access to my entire system. There is absolutely nothing that could ever go wrong.
Nah but seriously, can we start a counter of how many times a chatbot agent has deleted someone's system32 because it was trained on data of the average tech forum?
> For anything more involved, I want a tab and an URL.
Why, exactly?
Probably for bookmarking or working iteratively over different sessions on the interaction and allowing more than one session at a time.
Or sharing.
Perhaps a gateway to run computer use locally?
https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use
I was hoping that's what this was, sadly it's not, but defn opening the door for it in the future
I don't think they could release computer use for $20/month plan. It seems super expensive and you could easily involve Claude for hours of work for manual tasks like data entry or data cleaning.
My experiments with computer use clocked in at $15/hour
yeah, that's what it seems like. As of today, there's no additional features I notice compared to having a Safari-based desktop version of this (which I uninstalled to install this one).
No Linux, I should have expected that. Web works fine, but damn no Linux.
It's disappointing that these companies are perfectly happy to use it for their own wealth creation strategy, but have no interest in giving back and furthering the ecosystem.
On macOS, why have an electron app when you can add the webpage to the dock as a PWA?
Here is the comparison:
Claude Electron app vs Claude Safari PWA
Pros:
* Can be opened with a customizable shortcut
* Takes less RAM (400 MiB < 600 MiB)
Cons:
* Needs to be downloaded
* Weight 150 MiB
* Slower to start
* Loose language localisation
* Loose Safari's capabilities:
The whole electron app uses less RAM than the page opened as a PWA? That’s surprising to me, how come? I somehow thought Safari was more memory efficient than Chromium
I was surprised, too, so I just checked. Sure enough, https://claude.ai takes 663MB.
I wonder if there’s an architectural difference that allows the Electron app to be more lean?
(Note I didn’t download the new app, just installed the PWA, so I didn’t verify those numbers.)
The browser takes 663MB, or specifically the tab?
The Claude tab, itself. From Activity Monitor:
640.6 MB https://claude.ai
51.5 MB Claude
28.8 MB Claude Web Content
20.9 MB Open and Save Panel Service (Claude)
17.5 MB Claude Graphics and Media
15.5 MB Claude Networking
5.6 MB com.apple.Safari.SandboxBroker (Claude)
5.1 MB QuickLookUIService (Open and Save Panel Service (Claude))
---
If I open Claude in Safari, Safari itself is 204MB, and the Claude tab is 640MB.
that's wild that essentially a website that's a few textboxes should take 600MBs+
as a chrome PWA it's 259MB for me, vs ~700MB for the electron app.
Tangentially, what are people using to have a unified interface to query multiple LLMs? Juggling multiple apps or websites for each provider gets annoying. I was using openrouter but the chat history is only stored in browser, so I'm looking for something else now. I tried open-webui[1] and that looks pretty good but I wonder if there are better alternatives.
[1] https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
There are a ton of alternatives if you search around. I created my own because I wanted something keyboard centric, and use OpenRouter with it: https://github.com/iansinnott/prompta. They all accomplish roughly the same thing though.
this is the best app i’ve found so far, better than anything else. Unfortunately it’s not open source and is only free for personal use.
It has web search and RAG that actually works properly out of the box. No fiddling with 100 settings.
https://msty.app/
Try MultiGPT which is a Chrome extension that consolidates several AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard, Claude, and more, into a single interfacee
Don't see linux, also no screenshots?
I would consider using this if I could just shove my API key in and have it run.
They add the same Option+Space (on macOS) shortcut that ChatGPT has, but the app feels a bit like a quick build overall, as it's just a web container. Hopefully they'll add some nice features that wouldn't work in a browser such as asking about what's on your screen or a shortcut to be able to speak questions and get a voice response.
Claude requires a phone nu.ber to sign up and the won't accept a Google number so they are completely un-usable.
I would love to try their services, but they refuse to take my money.
I’ve been trying to sign up for Claude for a couple of weeks now (I was even planning to pay), but alas, signups remain closed for now.
can someone tell me what the difference is to the webclient? Seems like a webview to me. No local caching/store.
Kids these days insist that they need the "app" of something, even when it's literally the exact same thing as the webpage.
Between this phenomenon and the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers, I can't help but wonder if a huge percentage of the populace have never heard of or used Bookmarks on their web browsers before.
I'm not a kid and I know about bookmarks, but I prefer using apps to apps in my browser. Electron apps I have less interest in, but I really don't like working in something like Figma (which is in the top of it's class) in the browser.
In-browser apps do all sorts of clunky things like going back a page because I'm trying to scroll right or left or hotkeys not working. Native apps feel so much better to use and I can close my browser and stay focused on the task.
I think it’s less about not knowing what a bookmark is and more about just having a more direct way to access it, where it’s more high-level than just in a tab. There’s just something mentally different about opening a program from your dock as opposed to from a tab, even if they’re both basically a website.
This line of reasoning was why I was hopeful that PWAs on the desktop would become first-class citizens, as far back as Mozilla Prism[1] in the late 2000s. They never really did seem to take off.
1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism
It used to be fairly common to have web-page shortcuts back in the mid-00's. Lots of apps would add spam shortcuts to your desktop that would just open your web browser to a web page where you were encouraged to buy something/donate/start a free trial.
Anyways I think that capability still exists on all modern OSes.
I swear if all the ai chat apps started as fat apps and then Claude just released the first port to the web, I would be reading this exact same comment on hacker news except complaining that there was nothing wrong with the fat app.
I like to ALT-TAB instead of CTRL-TAB because I always have fewer applications open than I do sites. I don't have dozens and dozens of tabs always open either, but always more than my programs.
I have ChatGPT app and Claude and Gemini PWAs on my dock. I gravitate towards using ChatGPT much more. It's just faster vs launching Chromium for each small query.
Having a hotkey to access the app removes a lot of friction
You aren’t as wise and smart as you think you are. Perhaps people just have different preferences to you?
I have no issue with others having differing preferences, just making an observation about the continual reinvention of this particular wheel
Dinosaurs these days insist that there's only one way to do things, even when most apps are literally designed to accommodate different workflows.
Please, tell me where I said there's only one way to do things.
My question was not meant as a critique of people who know what they're doing. I'm not talking about engineers or sys-admins like the typical HN crowd, I'm talking about the population at large. The average person understands their devices just enough to get them to work the way they want. It stands to reason that a fairly large percentage of the modern population, used to using apps for every individual service, may never have had a use for browser bookmarks and may therefore never have even attempted to use them.
I have a few friends who work as professors and tell me stories about how their students don't know how to navigate a filesystem in Windows. Why would a person like that, for instance, have bothered to learn what a bookmark is vs just keeping a tab open?
> the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers
I have too many bookmarks, I'd never find anything in there. Keeping it open is the only way.
I was thinking more about people who use Tree Style Tabs and have nested Tab folders and such when I wrote that part. It's simple enough to save an entire session as a bookmark folder, to open an entire folder of bookmarks as new tabs (rather than needing to hibernate tabs to save ram while still keeping them "open"), and to search through bookmarks ad-hoc. Bookmark folders can be infinitely nested, categorized, ordered by when you were looking (though searching through your browser history also works for that), combined, copied, pasted, moved, put into or removed from the bookmark toolbar.
It's an incredibly flexible system that allows for a massive variety of workflows and it feels like people just keep finding ways to recreate it, but worse: less platform-independent, eating more system resources, dependent on third-party plugins, or (in the case of using an app for everything) eating up orders of magnitude more storage space at rest.
It's simple. Tabs keep state[0], bookmarks don't.
The web went to shit a long time ago; you can't rely on being able to bookmark a site and then go back to where you were. Half the sites are infinite scroll, or dynamically generated pages, or SPAs[1], or some other ephemeral invention du jour. Keeping a tab open gives you some chance to return to where you were for some time; bookmarks are just giving up.
--
[0] - At least until the browser decides to screw with you and unloads the tabs you needed. Firefox on Android is particularly aggressive at that, which incidentally makes PWAs unusable, too.
[1] - You're lucky when those let you make a bookmark that won't drop you back to index page when loaded.
There isn't one, it's just an Electron app that opens slower than the webpage and flashes white before it appears.
You'd think, a company that has such powerful AI and no restrictions on requests to it would be able to bash out truly native apps no rather than something that looks quite shoddily made, like making your electron app not flash white when in dark mode is amateur level stuff.
From what I can tell you're right, it's essentially a web front end made to compete with ChatGPT's desktop app.
The only real benefit is the hotkey (ctrl + alt + space) for starting a new prompt when the window is closed, but still running in the background.
chatgpt has that shortcut too.
option + space for mac, and alt + space for windows.
but this can start with Windows and sit in your system tray, sending you popup reminders!
We're 2-3 sprints away from a claude popup saying "It looks like you're writing a resume, would you like help with that?"
A Copilot version is probably slated for 2025H1.
Pssst, they are probably here reading
You can do exactly the same with a PWA without Electron garbage.
Somewhat unrelated question for developers: when is an app generally better suited for the desktop vs a web app? Asking for myself.
I'm still waiting for the ability to change my email address :/
I'm still waiting for the ability to change my email address...
...and also to log on without visiting an AlphaGoogle domain.
It speaks poorly of Anthropic that their 1FA login requires a third party.
Then again, Google isn't exactly a 3PP in relation to Anthropic, more of a 2½PP.
Lots of people are correctly suggesting this could function just as equally well as a PWA, but I will point out that (all things being equal) there are some valid use-cases when strictly choosing between Electron vs PWA that a LOT OF PEOPLE seem to be oblivious of:
- Electron apps don’t rely on a web server to function, so as long as you archive the app’s installer, you can install it on future computers even if the original website goes down. This assumes that the PWA/Electron App in question doesn't need server features, for example Photopea, Obsidian, etc.
- A bit easier to block network traffic to/from a dedicated application from a privacy perspective. Still can be done on a PWA, but it's trickier to set up.
Apparently running a daemon with the system browser has gone out of fashion, or a skill lost in modern times.
Not to mention the whole calling into a server anyway.
It would be nice to see a de-coupling of the backend (as a service, deamon, etc.) so that we could choose the desired frontend of our choice (net win from a UI/UX, accessibility perspective, etc.), but it's been a long time since I've encountered a consumer level application that did this.
I mean, re: point 1, we're talking about an app that calls an API for every interaction already, so that doesn't seem super relevant. If Claude is down, you can't use it whether it's through a PWA or an Electron app.
> "Lots of people are correctly suggesting this could function just as equally well as a PWA, but I will point out that (all things being equal) there are SOME VALID USE-CASES"
YES - I am speaking GENERALLY. That's why I literally called that out in my comment that this particular use-case (Claude Desktop) could easily be done with a PWA.
Gotcha. Sorry, I guess that was unclear to me based on your phrasing. When you said "some valid use-cases", I thought perhaps you meant (for this app) and not (for Electron apps in general) as the implied next clause.
No worries, yeah I just meant that if a dev has no intention of building a native app and is only deciding between either a PWA or an Electron/Tauri App, then there are some advantages to the latter.
I'd say for the case of Tauri it's doubly so. You can have natively compiled Rust code for especially compute-intensive functions, rather than having it running via WASM.
If you could access chats offline, that'd be useful.
But you should be able to do that with PWA.
An Electron app is anything but fast.
It can be faster than a normal web page depending on how they configure it though.
Indeed not everyone is able to write Web sites with good performance across multiple browsers, that is 3l1t3 skill, better ship Chrome alongside the application.
What a simplistic (and I think erroneous) view of Electron!
You can't spare 40mb of RAM?
More like 400MB, and the problem isn't that I can't spare it. The problem is that I can only spare 400 MB a few times at most before it starts becoming an issue.
I have stuff to do on my computer, stuff that often involves multiple programs (one of them almost always being a browser!). Then there's bunch of support stuff that I want, or have to, keep around. A music player, an IM, a mail client, etc. When everything gets packaged as Electron apps, even those tiny utilities add up quickly, and everything slows. down. Or worse, gets starved for RAM and starts stuttering (Windows) or just gets OOM-killed (Linux).
And I say that as a dev/techie, who has plenty of RAM. Non-tech people tend to have computers that are memory-starved by default. Building trivial stuff as Electron apps, where native would be 100x less resource-intensive, is just peak developer laziness/selfishness.
It's more like 400MB due to how they're packaged. And when you could have it run with 10x to 20x less RAM, it just scream "we don't care about you". Not everyone have 64GB RAM and 22 cores of CPU in their laptop.
It's like using a semi-truck (with the trailer attached) to go buy groceries 100 meters away.
I'm unsure where I'm supposed to look. In the Task Manager, the app I created (Video Hub App), when running, is routinely between 40MB and 120MB under the "Memory" column. Are you saying there is RAM use tucked away under different row than the app name?
https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
The fact people prefer webapps over native locally run software because of '400MB' honestly pisses me off it's so stupidly trivial.
It's not for the storage or ram space. It's for being inefficient which always making me doubt about the company culture. If you want native capabilities so much, just build a proper software for the platform. If VLC and Calibre can do cross platform, you can do it too.
It's not native though. It's just a webapp in a second browser without any of the usual browser features, and reduced sandboxing.
It's all the negatives of a webapp and all the negatives of a native app with none of the positives.
A website packaged with the Web browser isn't a native app.
I already have a browser installed.
Apparently the developers couldn't get rid of turning the Web into ChromeOS.
I was surprised that simple things like sharing a chat in Claude doesn't seem to be there. I read somewhere that it was a feature that was disabled later.
It's annoying, I'd really love to export my chats. Any Anthropic PMs reading this, as a paying subscriber I command you to prioritise this feature, on pain of failed training runs
Other than ease of set up, why would anybody use this over LibreChat, which allows you to plug in api keys for all services?
Other than ease of set up, why would any one use this over training their own large language model from scratch using magnets?
I like LibreChat a great deal, but its pretty heavy-weight (over a more bundled solution like Jan) in terms of spinning up a bunch of docker containers (meilisearch, mongo, vector db, etc.)
LibreChat is still a webapp, not a native app (ie, the topic of this post).
i've lost my faith to claude because of gpt4o and the advanced voice features.
The main questions: Can this be used with no limit on file "uploads"?
I hope this will be available from Homebrew soon.
This LLM hype is out of control, they literally bullshit on any novel input (admittedly there's not a lot of this) and are wrong 15-20% of the time for all inputs
This isn't a "we'll just add more context", "we'll just add more instructions and params", "our multi-head transformers will auto-attention the tits off your query" etc - this is search based on probability maps. It is structurally unable to be intelligent, no matter how many models you chain together and how much compute you throw at it. But it can sure mimic that shit, which is why LPs are going to lose their shirts and GPs are going to struggle to raise follow on funds.
Let's move on.
I do not want to give my phone number to a company.