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.
Anyways I think that capability still exists on all modern OSes.
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 have too many bookmarks, I'd never find anything in there. Keeping it open is the only way.
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.
I suppose I actively avoid most infinite scroll webpages because to me they feel like they're meant for "consumption" and visual appeal rather than actual usefulness and I tend to think of webpages as tools, either for information or socializing. As a dev I'm certainly biased towards sites like Github or news sites, which are both meticulous at sending you to the page you were linked to specifically rather than redirecting you elsewhere.
I do tend to keep a few tabs open at any given time, but only when I'm in the middle of reading something like an article or blog post. I try to close down my tabs to something like 5-8 max weekly, if not daily. Something about closing out the mental context and making a conscious decision about whether I really want to finish reading something or if it was boring me feels very freeing once I've decided to close the tab is deeply satisfying to me.
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 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.
option + space for mac, and alt + space for windows.
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.
You can't spare 40mb of RAM?
“Electron bad!” is as much of a cargo culted snobby HN myth as “Macs have no RAM!”
Apparently the developers couldn't get rid of turning the Web into ChromeOS.
It's like using a semi-truck (with the trailer attached) to go buy groceries 100 meters away.
It's all the negatives of a webapp and all the negatives of a native app with none of the positives.
It peaks to around 3GB during the hub creation (on a folder with ~100 videos but I see your demo is limited to 50).
It finally settles at 350MB.
Here's the breakdown: https://ibb.co/N9MYvNx
My guess is that what you view in your task manager is a single process, not all the processes started by your application.
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.
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.
- 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’d think with all the funding these companies have they’d make better technical decisions
Who said that this was to help the end user!
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?
Why, exactly?
This will open in the native app if it's installed, and on the Web if not. Basically, it works like any modern app link.
For some reason, I expected the same from Anthropic, but the Claude app, in its current state, is quite inferior.
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:
- Printing the content of the current page
- Speech2Text
- Accessibility
- ...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.)
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.
- 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.
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.
But you should be able to do that with PWA.
Not to mention the whole calling into a server anyway.
i can click the "install page as app" button in chrome myself, thanks.
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 would love to try their services, but they refuse to take my money.
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.
...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.
It has web search and RAG that actually works properly out of the box. No fiddling with 100 settings.
https://github.com/TypingMind/typingmind https://www.typingmind.com/
We also recently added floating chat feature. Check out the demo: https://x.com/recursechat/status/1846309980091330815
* See [File over app](https://stephango.com/file-over-app).
- 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.
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.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire...
you can combine it with your shell to call claude, chatgpt
sc expands to s --provider claude sgpt expands to s --provider chatgpt
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-wi...
MIT License on GitHub
This week it got the X.ai API added which is what I'm using. Grok is not as good as Claude or ChatGPT yet, but don't bet against Elon.
https://x.com/ServeTheHome/status/1850917031421399543
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1830650370336473253
It's the desktop solution I've been looking for. If you have a heap of prompts, you can create a Workspace for each. Super easy.
Here's my prompts if anyone is interested:
https://github.com/grantcarthew/notes/tree/main/Prompts
I only have two minor complaints with AnythingLLM: 1. No light mode (why does everyone want dark mode, it sucks for anyone older than 30) 2. It's electron
Edit: replaced cluster link with source (I think)
(Note: it has first class support for Obsidian.md vaults.)
A few outstanding features:
- Fast: Import ChatGPT history, loads thousands of conversations at once.
- Floating Chat: spotlight / ChatGPT desktop app like floating window.
- Customization: You can add any OpenAI compatible API (including X.ai) as a model, and just edit the url/model id
- Chat with files: Not as complete as complete as a RAG solution for now, but we feature simplicity. Basically you can drag and drop PDF files onto a session or add files/folders to a model (like custom GPT) to start chatting.
- And, yes we support light mode! And several light mode code themes as well
Judging from how many older coders use it I think it’s just you, mate.
You said: “ 1. No light mode (why does everyone want dark mode, it sucks for anyone older than 30)”
I’ve had astigmatism literally my entire life and, once again, have loved dark mode anywhere it’s been offered (except my Kindle, which just looks weird).
Every programmer over the age of 30 that I know uses dark mode exclusively, and there’s a reason companies offer it: it is widely used and demanded.
Acting everybody in the demographic of people over 30 feels the way you feel about it on account of their age is just laughable.
There's been some inflection point where the desktop version is now often worse than the web app. And you can't blame web tech because the web app in the browser is usually quite good.
WhatsApp on macOS has catastrophic bugs for years. I regularly can't focus the input field and have to relaunch it. Until recently, its image modal would regularly bug out and leave behind a global dimmed window that eats all input so you can't even close it.
Poe's desktop app is less polished than poe.com. Off the top of my head, its desktop app scrollbar becomes so tiny that you can't even click and drag it.
ChatGPT's desktop app is simply worse than its web app or was when I stopped using it months ago for that reason.
Youtube Music is another pointless desktop app since it's just the web app inside a web view, though at least it embraces that.
It's like the only thing going for these desktop apps is that you can alt-tab to them individually. It's time to come up with a trivial one-click first-class OS-level way to turn websites into apps and put all these sad desktop apps out of their misery.
Oh well, it's come at a good time because I've mostly soured to the idea of having to install software at all. 90% can be run in a sandboxed browser away from my file system.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-...