Checking Out The Stainless 0.1 Multi-Purpose Web Browser
inspired by Google Chrome. Each tab in Stainless runs in a separate
process.
So, why did they create yet-another-WebKit-browser? Because, the company says, building a multi-process browser for OS X was a cool way to leverage the multi-processing technology they developed for one of their products, Hypercube.
Each tab runs in a separate process, which purportedly means:
• Increased performance.
• Slow page loads (esp. due to plugins) can't affect the responsiveness of the browser, or of pages in other tabs.
• Increased stability. Crashed pages can't bring down the browser.
• Decreased memory usage. Once a tab is closed, the memory for that session is completely freed to the system.
Like Chrome, Stainless also has tabs that can be dragged between windows, a unified address and search bar, and a private browsing mode.
Intrigued, I downloaded Stainless and ran ir for a couple of days over the weekend. Mesa Dynamics warns that t this point, Stainless is really just a technology demo and is likely to stay that way (though although they might add some novel ideas we have for bookmark, history and download management).
It's pretty bare bones - looks like a stripped-down version of Safari, which is of course due to its Webkit underpinnings. It didn't blow me away with speed over my poky dialup connection, there are no Bookmarks or preferences beyond a search engine configurator included, and it didn;t deliver on the claim of "increased stability", managing to lock up my computer and requiring a hard force reboot. An interesting exercise I guess, but I hope Chrome when it arrives for the Mac offers a better browsing experience than this.
The release blurb does note that judging from Chromium's OS X Detailed Status page, the Mac version of Chrome will use a WebCore-rendered bitmap to pass between the browser and rendering processes. The strategy Mesa Dynamics uses in Hypercube (and now Stainless) is far less impressive, but a whole lot easier to do and, thus, available today.
New in version 0.1:
• multi-processing architecture (one process per tab)
• drag-and-drop tabs between windows
• unified address and search bar
• private browsing mode
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard")
System Support:
PPC/Intel
Stainless is freeware
Version 0.1 is available immediately for download at
http://www.stainlessapp.com/
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