Fluid… Give your favorite webapps a home on your Mac OS X Desktop.
Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Insert_Your_Favorite_Webapp_Here fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site crashing your browser and causing you to loose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?
If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your webapp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop including Dock icon, menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.
How does it work? Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Then provide a name, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.
Use Fluid to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other webapp as a separate desktop application.
Anytime you click a link to another site in an SSB, the link is opened in your system default web browser, keeping your SSB dedicated to the original site you’ve specified.
What’s new:
Version 0.9.2.1:
• NOTE: See the Fluid Blog for an advisory on this update regarding missing SSB custom icons.
• FluidInstance.app: Changeable SSB Application Icons (look in General Preferences).
• FluidInstance.app: Single Window Browsing Mode (General Preferences). Actually this is more correctly called “TargetedLinksCreateTabs” and means that any website which attempts to spawn a new browser window will create a new tab in the current window instead. The user may still create new windows with cmd-N.
• FluidInstance.app: True Full Screen Browsing Mode. cmd-opt-F. (Window menu -> Toggle Full Screen Mode)
• FluidInstance.app: Change to Embedded SSBs. Now they can be made to obey your “Spaces Behavior” preference (appear in all or not). This is cool cuz you can set a different Embedded SSB in each Space for a different background in each. Unfortunately, this means that by default Embedded SSBs don’t work with Expose quite the way I have demonstrated. However, you can reclaim that Expose behavior by changing the Spaces Behavior setting to “Windows Appear in All Spaces”
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Fix for the missing MenuExtra icon if there’s no favicon or custom icon (Defaults to DotMac-style blue globe).
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Session Restore works in MenuExtra and Embedded SSBs again (broken in 0.9.2 release).
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Fixed issue where sometimes the Plug-in Preference Panes would not appear in the Preferences Window.
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Fixed issue where you couldn’t drag a browser window by the chrome at the bottom (status bar chrome).
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Added resizer graphic in the corner of Embedded SSB windows - helps you realize that you can resize Embedded SSBs if you like.
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Block PopUp Windows is on by default.
• FluidInstance.app: FIX: Accept Cookies “Only from sites you naviagate to” is on by default (rather than “Always”).
• FluidInstance.app Plugin-API: FIX: Support for dragging splitview plugins all the way out to fill the entire browser window (they render properly now after the window is resized).
• Thumbnail Plug-in: Significantly improved load time/UI response time performance.
• Thumbnail Plug-in: When refreshing the current page to reload the thumbnails, the selected index is preserved.
• Thumbnail Plug-in: Adding built-in URL Pattern for Microsoft’s live.com search engine.
