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This is a Chrome app. I miss the days of native apps. :(

A native app would certainly have its advantages, although it would require putting pre-compiled binaries up for Windows, OSX, and various Linux distros.

By contrast, making it a Chrome app allows it to run on any OS that supports Chrome, including Chromebooks. So I understand the decision. But I'm primarily a Firefox user, so a native app or at least an FF add-on would personally be preferable to me.

True. Although, I don't understand why it has to be a Chrome app. Why not just a NW.js app? Maybe for the whole "connect with your phone" functionality?

Perhaps somebody could shed some light on this?

My guess is it uses Chrome's Native Client [1] for crypto. It's understandable why they might want to do this at this point in time, because the only other way to use native code for crypto in the browser is through the the Web Crypto API [2], which is still very young and implementations aren't very consistent across browsers yet anyways.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/native-client

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/

So, effectively, they use native code anyway, but make debugging worse for users?

Great...

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