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Comment by afruitpie | Hacker News Reader

Sad, I liked that ChatGPT had a native app on macOS. I don’t understand why OpenAI and Anthropic have to rely on vending universal apps when their whole MO is code being dirt cheap.

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Same. I don't see why they thought this was a good move.

maybe they asked chatgpt about it :)

You’re absolutely right and your solution is actually a better implementation.

Haha. I love the Claude speak.

I asked ChatGPT about this change and my version, with knowledge of how it and I work together, certainly prefers the old one.

AppKit and SwiftUI and WinUI are all meh for rendering lots of text. Chromium is quite good at it.

Plus they have lots of embedded web content these days and managing webviews is a relative pain vs it all being one webview

Why is a browser tool better at rendering text than native?

Because web sites have always been about rendering huge scrollable amounts of text and images

Because there is more competition to render sites in a pleasing way, switching cost is lower. The operating systems have a high switching cost, very few people will learn a new OS because the text is a little fuzzy.

It's fairly simple sans-serif text with some markdown formatting, eh?

Yea but rendering a book’s worth of that, with text selection and embedded web content, is not trivial with the native UI frameworks like it is with web UI.

I look forward to John Gruber’s screed on this given his recent rampages against Electron apps, and his preference for OpenAIs native macOS app (relative to Claude).

Technically I think it uses something called OpenAI OWL not Electron https://openai.com/index/building-chatgpt-atlas/ (which they extracted from Atlas, but the new app mentions it in the about window)

it's just Yet Another Chromium, like everything else.

It's less a screed and more of a reasoned argument, in this case. The Claude app is ass, as are most electron apps compared to native.

Don’t disagree, but screed funnier. Plus it still fits, as the dictionary definition is “lengthy, often ranted” — which doesn’t preclude reasoned.

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