Review: Fluid 0.9.1.3

2:21 pm, May 21st, 2008, Craig Grannell

Increasingly, people work online, using web-based applications for day-to-day tasks. Unfortunately, web browsers aren’t the most robust of applications—a single unruly website or advert is enough to lock up Firefox or bring down Safari unexpectedly. At best, you’ll waste time reopening a browser and signing back in; at worst, you’ll lose work and a precious little nugget of sanity.

Inspired by Prism by Mozilla Labs, Fluid offers an approach referred to as Site-Specific Browsers (SSBs). As the method’s name suggests, this enables you to create browsers for specific sites, making them akin to desktop applications. This is great from a stability standpoint—there aren’t other windows with content that can cause problems—but it’s also handy in making you focus on the tasks at hand, rather than getting tempted to check out other websites.

Creating SSBs using Fluid is child’s play—you bung a URL, name, location and icon (if you don’t have one to hand, an application icon is created based on the site’s favicon) into Fluid’s sole dialog, hit ‘Create’ and wait a few seconds. Fluid then invites you to launch your new SSB, which is basically a honed-down Safari with your site preloaded, restricted to site-specific content (click on an ‘external’ link and it launches in your default browser). Usefully, some SSBs (such as those based on online email) provide Dock badge updates, just like Mail, and each SSB can be restyled (UI, opacity, fonts) and set to various window levels. Not so usefully, Fluid doesn’t work particularly well with some sites (during our tests, Flickr was a notable culprit) until you tinker with the SSB’s advanced preferences and add some extra URLs that it’s allowed to peruse.

Interestingly, Fluid’s creator appears keen to take his application further. Recent builds have seen Fluid become a reasonable browser for general use, and while the ability to browse via Cover Flow won’t win it many friends, forthcoming tabbed browsing improvements and menu-extra SSBs mean Fluid has the potential to gain a strong foothold in the Mac browser market, rather than remaining a purely niche concern.

Fluid screen grab
Cover Flow in a web browser! (Don’t worry, Cover Flow objectors—you can turn it off.)

Further information

Manufacturer: Todd Ditchendorf
Price: Free
URL: fluidapp.com

Posted by Craig Grannell in Reviews, Software, Web | Comment on this article

About the author

Craig Grannell is Cult of Mac's designer and an occasional contributor. He also runs iPhoneTiny.com, a Twitter-driven reviews site for iPhone apps and games. Follow Craig on Twitter @CraigGrannell and visit his website, Snub Communications.

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4 comments

I love the idea of SSBs. What would be better than a dedicated app for gmail? The only drawback is that I am used to the enhanced macros of Better GMail (thanks to Greasemonkey and Lifegacker) and so for now that is a priority and I just keep GMail open in a separate window. I wonder if the developer has any plans to address this in future updates?

chris, on May 21st, 2008 at 4:41 pm

i used fluid since 0.8.6, but then got tired of updating each application after the time when updates started pouring each week. I’m not saying that updates are bad, it just got annoying.

Eimantas, on May 21st, 2008 at 10:02 pm

Never heard of, Interesting.

Thanks.

Deocliciano, on May 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm

[...] cultofmac, fluid] [...]

Fluid: SSBs fÃƒÂ¼r Mac OS X Leopard - Gizmodo DE - Gizmodo DE, on September 24th, 2008 at 11:47 am