"A desktop app allows for vastly more functionality than a website."

This really isn't true anymore with PWAs. A lot of reference managers are exclusively web-apps, or at least have web-apps at near feature parity (Paperpile, Petal, Readcube Papers, Mendeley, EndNote).

No, we really did mean "a" there. Many of the things on that page wouldn't be possible with a PWA — a local database fully under your control, unrestricted access to arbitrary servers for downloading metadata/files/feeds/etc., integration with local word processors without going through a server, ability to run local executables or make low-level calls into platform APIs, a plugin framework that allows unlimited customization and transformation of the app experience…

Some of the things on the page could be accomplished by moving functionality to the server, which isn't restricted by the web platform, and we've been gradually doing that to add features to the web library, but that's a completely different model with major trade-offs and not at all a replacement for the desktop app.

(But yes, Zotero also has way more functionality than most of those other tools — even their desktop versions, but certainly their web versions. It's also a bit bizarre to mention Mendeley as an example here, given that they rather infamously replaced their relatively featureful native app with a new version that's a wrapper around their website and has a fraction of the previous functionality.)

No, @ProudChamp was just quoting the linked page verbatim.

That "crapware" allows PDF text extraction, OCR, git integration, and much more, all without sending your personal stuff off to a server out of your control. None of this "crapware" (and I challenge you to name a single piece of "crapware" that Zotero or its ecosystem hypothetically bring to its users' system) is brought to your machine without your consent. And the plugin system of Zotero is utterly unmatched by any of its well-funded competitors.

There's a market for Chromebooks, but for some strange reason people seem to vastly prefer WinTel/Macs over chromebooks, and it's not even close. Now, I have aging relatives using chromebooks and I'm happy they do, because indeed, not much to screw up. But the tradeoffs are simply not universally appealing, and it's beyond laughable to assume that people who don't use chromebooks, or who prefer native apps over PWAs, are simply ignorant, pending their enlightenment after hearing the gospel of chrome.

Anyhow, you list a number of apps that are seemingly happy with the PWA tradeoffs, so it would seem more productive to try and convince those to get parity with Zotero. Shouldn't be hard for them to do the way you describe it.

It has been said here and extensively discussed on other threads in this forum that there are plans to provide significant improvements to the Zotero web presence. No one has questioned that you and other people with security concerns may not be able to install their own software on work-owned computers. (I am a bit puzzled that you would be allowed to use your own self-hosted Zotero application if restrictions are concerned with disclosure of sensitive information.)

You should know that it is possible to run Zotero without syncing. Is your organization's issue concern about Zotero capturing metadata via the web? There is a great deal of information about security protections available that you can share with your tech support team.

There is a local version of the Zotero server but that comes without support from the Zotero team.

Several of us are trying to help, notwithstanding our perception that it is you who are being hostile [your use of the term crapware]. Perhaps, if you step back and use different words to explain what you want and describe what you need that you believe Zotero doesn't provide. Explain in more detail the nature of the restrictions you are facing from your employer. Especially, please describe what you think that the other bibliography management software you mentioned can do that Zotero cannot.

Until now your question and criticisms of Zotero have had little or nothing to do with GPT or LLM.

Edit: You commented on MS Office 365. You should know that for years that Zotero is largely compatible with Word 365. Zotero is compatible with Google Docs. Zotero is compatible with LibreOffice Writer.

Is the crux of your needs that you want a version of Zotero that will work better with a ChromeBook and online word processor?

This is getting a bit muddled. @ProudChamp wasn't the OP and presumably just wants to run a version of Zotero with something approaching full functionality on an ARM-based Chromebook. That will be addressed by a future version of Zotero for ARM Linux, not the web library.

@ProudChamp, the reason people are responding to you this way is because you came here and confidently asserted that we're wrong about the limitations of a web app without seeming to actually understand the technical issues — you're misunderstanding either the scope of Zotero's desktop functionality or what's possible in a PWA, and don't seem interested in the details. I've taken the time to explain many of the things that wouldn't be possible in a PWA, and you've ignored almost everything I've said and instead suggested that…we're installing "crapware" on people's computers?

I'm not sure why you're even posting to this thread, which is about a self-hosted web version of Zotero, not a PWA of the zotero.org web library.

I don't think engaging with you is really worth more of anyone's time, but since we're here:

I also find it strange to mention native word processor integration as a feature when even Microsoft has all but abandoned offline Office suite

What are you talking about? Microsoft 365 includes their offline suite, which is updated all the time and used by millions of people — including the millions of Zotero users using Zotero with Word. Do you actually know anything about Zotero? The online version of Word doesn't yet even support the basic API features we need to create an equivalent plugin (though we're working with Microsoft to make that possible).

We also support LibreOffice (which Mendeley dropped support for when they switched to a website wrapper), and even our Google Docs integration can be used with a local Zotero library via a local HTTP server.

And Git is a completely web-based service

The Zotero app itself doesn't integrate with git, so that wouldn't have been my example (I would've said, say, launching external PDF readers with command-line parameters, calling 'osascript' to integrate with Word on macOS, calling 'mv' to efficiently migrate large folders on macOS and Linux, etc.), but…git isn't a "service" and doesn't inherently have anything to do with the web? Are you thinking of GitHub? You're just out of your depth here.

You seem to have a lot of misconceptions about Chrome and the Debian Linux system that it runs

You're the one talking about PWAs! If you want to brag about your Chromebook actually running Linux, then nothing you're posting here makes any sense. Zotero — the actual app, with all the functionality that's not possible in a PWA — runs on x86_64 Chromebooks and will likely run on ARM Chromebooks in the future.

I don't know what you're trying to accomplish here, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about and don't seem interested in understanding, so I think we can just be done.

@shahram7: Some self-hosted version of the web library that somehow replicated all of the Zotero desktop functionality using local server storage and network access would be a completely different project from anything we create, so no use holding out hope for that. As I say, we'll continue to improve the official web library — we added annotation creation a few days ago — but that's never going to be a full replacement for the desktop app.

"git is entirely web based" LOL.