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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

When rendering text, what would you expect CPU to be? For however long it takes to render, you’d expect it to max out.

What are some of the bugs? I’ve not noticed any. The feature lag is real, still no canvas.

For me the window is laggy and takes a few seconds to resize or move. It's also not reliable when prompting sometimes it just sits there with no output and I have to quit and restart. I've since uninstalled the desktop app and I'm happier with the "Add to Dock" web version.

Also search is unavailable, regarding missing features.

Have you updated? Mine has search, in 1.2024.289.

And doesn't work on Intel Macs. :-/

A desktop app that renders a website can still be useful if it exposes native APIs to the website.

does this do that?

Uuuh.. so take all my data, as long as it's native?

Desktop apps can store what they like. There is no EU law preventing desktop apps from storing anything, unlike websites.

That’s not entirely true. GDPR covers all forms of storing and processing PII. Wether that is a website or a desktop application, you will need to get opt in from your user to share PII with third parties.

This is not true - both GDPR & ePrivacy rules apply to any software, none of it is specific to websites (although obviously that's where it's most easily abused, and where most of the attention is).

Which part of General Data Protection Regulation in GDPR don't you understand?

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