Chess.com desktop client?

This has probably been asked plenty of times, but the only post I found was from some years ago, so I'll ask it again.

Are there any plans for a desktop version of Chess.com, or at least make the online-play compatible with already existing chess desktop clients?

In my experience, desktop clients tend to be smoother/faster, no closing the browser by mistake and makes you able to better focus on what's on-screen. I'm a big fan of desktop clients, but the Chess.com community and features suit my needs the best, why I won't pay for ICC or anything like it.

I understand if such a client is not prioritized by the development team, but might there be one? How many would want one?

We did have one a very long time ago but very few were interested in using it so it was withdrawn.  We may look at re-adding one in the future, but it isn't high on the list of features to add sorry.

Yeah, I understand improving/adding features is prioritized, but I'd be overjoyed to have a desktop client; anyone who feels the same, please post here! :)

I'd love one. :)

Agreed.... or allow existing clients to play on the site?  Is there a downside to this from the chess.com staff's perspective? 

existing client permitted to connect to chess.com would be nice...

That would make sense -- some kind of public API to allow third-party clients, maybe?

I am not a member of the staff, but I can definitely see their point here. Just a few problems off the top of my head:

• A desktop application is not cross-platform. It's not 1998 anymore and only supporting Windows is not a reasonable buisness plan anymore. I, for one, am not using any Windows machines... And yes, I know about Java, but even Java is not the silver bullet.
• It doesn't provide a level field. While this is not an issue if the time control is, say, 15 minutes, rapid chess is increasingly popular and more than 50% of the games (almost 100% of games where players are rated 1600 or more) are played at 5 minutes or less. Interfaces can be optimized for fast play with things like premove stacks, smartmoves, kings' "air squares" highlighting, automove (i.e. play a random legal move if you have less than 1 second on the clock) which are all ridicolously easy to implement, but if not done consistently over all interfaces can provide unfair advantages.
• All sorts of shenanigans with timeseal and the alike.
• Dreadful integration with other chess.com features. ICC interfaces the OP mentioned are fine because the server is actually a telnet server and games are played over the said protocol. This is not the case with chess.com.
• Additional work (and monetary cost) of deploying, testing, debugging, mantaining and supporting the new software.
• Does not "just work". You would have to download it, compile it, install it, potentially fire up an emulator, and eventually run it, with potential added troubleshooting at each step. Maybe it's not an issue to you. It's not an issue to me, either, but it could be to less computer-proficient users. Compare it to the current system: log in, play.

I would like a desktop client too, but I can definitely see it not being any kind of priority right now. Also, the web client we currently have is relatively sane both as technology (Yay for HTML5!) and as feature set and I could live and be happy with it even without further development.

+1 to OP. I don't want to have to have my browser open to play games.

+1 definitely.

Same Here :D

I would settle for a non-java based version of the one in the browser. It's horribly slow even on my i7 computer :-/

Having said the above, as I'm finding more and more 'applications' that are actually all-in-one webpages, I've started using Chromium's app mode more and more.

I use Firefox mainly, but for things like chess.com and online-go.com I just run 'chromium --app=<url>' and get the browser without tabs or status bar. It's looks close enough to a 'real' application that I'm happy with it. :)

It's not going to happen.

It's a small minority that wants a non-browser client (and one that needs to move on to the 2000s ;)...), and the resources required would be silly:  a team of developers just for handling all the platforms, etc.  Allowing 3rd party clients is not likely, either, as it is much harder to catch or prevent cheating, which is already a rampant problem.

Resources would be better spent in fixing browser UI issues and bad design (there are too many interstitial pages on Chess.com, for one thing, and the top down page structure makes little sense at all). 

I would love to have this, but I recognize that the extra work may not be worth it for the devs.  Playing things in browser always feels very 'cheap' to me, and I'm sure quite a few others feel similarly.

here here

Same here...

Also interested in a desktop client, but understand the extra work and lack of interest.

The current chess.com browser interface is too clumsy for speed chess.

i also want desktop client because i have a slow connection of internet it would be better if we have desktop client please make one