Signal is my favorite messaging application. It offers very good confidentiality and is easy to use. I also appreciate the fact that a desktop client was released, which meant I didn’t have to pull out my phone every time I wanted to reply to somebody. What I didn’t like though was the fact that the Signal desktop client was a Chrome app. If you use a browser besides Chrome you had to install Chrome just to use Signal’s desktop client. Fortunately, Google announced that it was deprecating Chrome apps and that forced Open Whisper Systems to release a standalone desktop client.
Now you can run the Signal desktop client without having to install Chrome.