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Gitter does have standalone clients: https://gitter.im/apps

In my experience they're no better than the web view.

I (and many others) keep up with Gitter rooms and IRC channels (Freenode, mostly) by bridging them to Slack or Kato with sameroom.io.

It's also a good way of merging interesting channels from the 15 Slack teams I am member of into one.

Mike from Gitter here. We've improved the performance of this quite a lot over the last few months and will soon start implementing local caching that will make this pretty much instantaneous.