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:
Also in Firefox Dev Edition settings (in the Firefox Labs section) you can turn on their AI chatbot feature which gives you the option to send the selected text to Claude or other chatbots and opens their response in a sidebar.
Also, if you prefer using AI assistants as desktop apps that feel separate to the browser and you can open directly, you can download Progressive Web Apps for Firefox [1] and create a separate shortcut for a sandboxed profile of Firefox with less visual clutter that open the assistant directly.
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.
Query parameters are so tired. All my homies embed their queries into the password portion of a basic auth header. Keeps your queries super secure from spies and competing browsers.
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.
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
- 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
No, it's related to Astigmatism. The eye lens gets distorted. Bright light shrinks the pupil, meaning the light goes through less of your lens and hence is not as distorted.
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.
That's what the "Workspaces" are. Create a workspace, go into the settings then "Chat Settings" and configure the Prompt. There are more configurations available.
I have an astigmatism and I prefer light mode because of it. Dark mode causes the letters to jump more and the optometrist agreed light mode is better for people with astigmatism and its a common issue.
Some haven't been updated for a while. Try the "software-evaluation.md" prompt, it's one of my best. I use it often. Use the bin/gp script to get them into your clipboard.
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.
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).
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.
Chat UIs are really the perfect candidate for a localfirst PWA. I have no idea why they are being built as either a full desktop app or UI where nothing is stored on device.
You’d think with all the funding these companies have they’d make better technical decisions
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.
Hardly a dumpster fire, moving to Linux from Windows is by far the best thing I’ve done for my work and sanity using a computer. For macOS users might be less of a reason, but aside from video editing workflow, has been a smooth process, and highly recommended for devs to give it another go.
I'd argue, that given the right hardware (I'd go with a Framework anytime again) and the right setup in terms ox *nix, I am happy to never touch a MB Pro (or any Mac) again in my life.
Absolutely. Framework laptop and a custom-built desktop each running Fedora, has been a wonderful experience. If I could have any setup I wanted with no consideration of cost, I would choose this one.
Distributing for linux sucks. There are dozen different ways to install applications and not a single format could be installed by say top 5 distro. I was hopeful for Snap, but it is awful in my experience. Unless the package is managed by the distribution itself, installing it sucks. e.g. Here is link for chromium binaries for linux[1].
Flatpak is sandboxed, which is both a good thing and bad thing. e.g. Claude won't be able to provide spotlight like interface, or have computer control.
Tried OpenSUSE recently. They describe 3 different ways on how to install Nvidia drivers in their docs. Not a single worked, had to install manually (which kinds of beats the entire purpose of using a rolling distro).
Could try something else but seem but slightly like a waste of time. Also the DE situation seems pretty bad... KDE would seem alright but its buggy and unpolished. Gnome is an abomination designed for tablets (which aren't even a thing on Linux).
For laptop, I personally don't know, only did a brief test on my backup system and seemed fine. However, Linux + Nvidia desktop has been good to me so far through many driver upgrades all through the standard 22.04 repositories (PopOS!, AMD AM4 Ryzen + 4070). Games work, dev tooling is amazing, and its _quiet_. I don't mean audibly, I mean process/notifications wise. On Windows my fans would spin up when I had nothing running, and it was some BS windows service I never wanted or used (telemetry, indexing, other), or MS trying to sell me something. PopOS! is lightning fast as I don't want fancy animations, just highly responsive computing.
If I was to go with a laptop (I doubt I will switch), I'd go with a Framework or System76.
Don’t use nvidia with Linux if you want easy. That’s nvidia’s problem. I use Fedora/gnome/phosh on a tablet and it’s getting better every day. Already meets my video tablet needs and could do office and games etc.
Linux Desktop isn't perfect, but it's in no way a dumpster fire. I'm much happier using Linux than any other viable alternative. Your experience clearly differs, but I personally have very few complaints at this point. Calling it a dumpster fire is extreme hyperbole.
I'm hoping they're incentivized to support Linux just based on the developer market share of Linux. The StackOverflow developer survey looks like it unfortunately allows people to choose multiple options which devalues the results and obscures the actual numbers, but at the top level 27% of developers are using Ubuntu desktop.
> The StackOverflow developer survey looks like it unfortunately allows people to choose multiple options which devalues the results and obscures the actual numbers
But how would you capture the situation when people are using both linux and Mac ? I for example have a good mini PC which run Linux and a MBP. I use both depending on where I'm (I mostly work from home). I even have a windows machine dedicated to gaming (not that it matters here).
Yeah, this is why I said it devalued the usefulness of the stat.
It goes both ways though. There are people who checked that they use Ubuntu when they're on Mac or Windows the majority of the time, but there are also people that checked they're on Debian which isn't feeding into the Ubuntu top line number. I'm not sure which way this is going to bias it -- I could see the number being much higher or much lower. Debian was at 9.8% (iirc) for instance, and I don't imagine there are many people using both Ubuntu/Debian for desktop usage.
> but at the top level 27% of developers are using Ubuntu desktop.
That seems very unlikely. The sample is of course probably extremely unrepresentative. Also I wouldn't be surprised if selection bias might have a significant effect (a lot of Linux users can't help but try and publicize the fact even if nobody is asking, so imagine what they do when someone does ask... Windows is likely the opposite).
I'm sure stack overflow is a biased subset of users, and I imagine the people that fill out tech surveys are going to be more likely to use Linux. But it's the best data source on this that I know of. Regardless of the exact market share percent, I think it's a reasonable assumption that there are millions of developers using it as a desktop OS.
Along those lines too, I don't have evidence but I'd bet that the type of developer who uses Linux is more likely to integrate new tech like LLM's into their workflow than someone whose on Windows.
99% of the time its always someone who has never actually used a proper Linux desktop OS lol and/or someone who couldnt even figure out how to list files on a Linux terminal.
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 suppose I use the PWA differently than most people? I just leave it open all the time, so I don't care how long it takes to start or how much data it takes to download to boot.
It’s such a poorly designed PWA. They really failed to take advantage of any of the browsers storage mechanisms. Like why not put conversation history in indexedDB?
This caused me a problem because I signed up with my personal email address, and then wanted a separate account for work but I only have one phone number and they won't let me use the same one on two accounts. I don't really care about giving them my phone number (it's out there everywhere anyway) but this has really reduced my ability to use their product.
Is this for the paid version? I'm using the free version, and it hasn't asked me for a phone number, but if the paid version requires a phone number, my reaction would be the same as yours: sorry, no.
In the age of eSIM, just order a free eSIM with zero credit, never charge it, never have any cost, and only enable it on your phone when a service like Anthropocene wants to send you some (completely unsecured) SMS code.
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.
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.
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.
How is 400MB trivial? I run more than 2 programs at once, and this adds up. Imagine if every trivial process in your OS used 400MB on startup. And what pisses me off, is when I have to close resource heavy electron applications (signal, vs code) running in the background to free up 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.
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 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.
Now that's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Give https://recurse.chat/ a try - I'm the developer. One particular advantage over alternative apps is importing ChatGPT history and speed of the app, including full-text search. You can import your thousands of conversations and every chat loads instantly.
Regarding chat history, I've been thinking that people should have ownership over chat history. We are migrating the chats towards SQLite, so your data is going to be a timeless format like files* - SQLite has long term support through year 2050. https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html
I'm a very, very happy user of TypingMind. It's not free, but it's worth the (one-time) license cost in my opinion. It has support for multiple providers, plugins, "agents" (pre-set templates), chat grouping, import/export, automatic syncing across devices, etc.
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.
I agree, I'm also firmly convinced it's the best. Until a month ago it has some bugs I disagreed with some design choices, but since 1-2 weeks ago it's the absolute best I've ever used and have easily convinced others to use it.
Try MultiGPT which is a Chrome extension that consolidates several AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard, Claude, and more, into a single interfacee
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 wish I knew of a good way to voice chat with Claude, and unfortunately, the new mobile app isn’t it. The voice recognition is terrible. Does it just use iOS’s built-in text-to-speech? It needs to be as good as Whisper to be useful.
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.
(I hope this thread doesn't go anywhere. I just feel like complaining.)
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.
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.
- 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.