713 Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose 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 complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many other goodies.

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock Menu Items, and more.

In Fluid 9.0, the Thumbnail Plug-in is bundled, allowing you to browse the web with CoverFlow- or iPhoto-like thumbnail previews for links on the current page. Watch the screencast in the sidebar on the right to see the Thumbnail Plug-in in action. How does the Thumbnail Plug-in know how to find the links on the current page from which to make the thumbnails? Simple... you can configure it with CSS in the Preferences window. Use CSS selectors to select links or images for a given URL pattern (like *google.com*). Add CoverFlow support for your own site with a simple CSS selector!

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a little tiny window where you specify the URL of a WebApp you'd like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, specify a Location and an Icon, 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 Mac desktop application.

(Shown here: Fluid, Campfire, Flickr, Fluther, Gmail, FriendFeed, github, Google Reader, Yahoo! Messenger, Muxtape, Tumblr, YouTube)

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.

Fluid is highly inspired by the excellent Prism (formerly WebRunner) project by Mozilla Labs. Check out Prism for much more information about SSBs and the benefits they provide to WebApp lovers.

Fluid is very similar in nature to Prism, but is based on Safari's WebKit rendering engine. And SSBs created by Fluid are true, native Cocoa OS X applications offering seamless integration into the Mac OS.

New in version 0.9:

• Fluid.app: Bugfix: Fix for crasher when clicking a 'Media' item in the sidebar of the 'select other icon...' open dialog.


• FluidInstance.app: Option to restore last browsing session.


• Restores window size, placement, and open tabs. On by default. Look in General Preference Pane.


• FluidInstance.app: Bugfix: Gmail and Google Reader SSBs no longer spawn empty/unnecessary windows when deferring browsing to the system default browser.


• FluidInstance.app: Option to open links in default web browser in the background.


• FluidInstance.app: Drag links to existing tabs or unused space in the tab bar to open the link in the existing tab or a more...


• Thumbnail Plug-in: XPath support added as alternative to CSS Selectors in Plug-in Preference Pane.


• Thumbnail Plug-in: Thumbnails will reload if you explicitly reload a page with a thumbnail-enabled URL.

System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.5 or later

System Support:
PPC/Intel

Free

For more information, visit:
http://fluidapp.com/

Tags: Software Updates ï Internet ï Software News ï

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