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Fluid 0.9.4.1

16.10.2008
While I'm a huge fan of tabbed browsers--you'll often find me using Firefox or Safari with 15 to 20 open tabs--this approach to en-masse web surfing does have its downsides. The biggest issue is when (not if) your browser crashes, it will take down all of your open tabs along with it. There may also be times you want to leave a page open while closing all your other tabs--if you don't think about this before hand, though, you'll more than likely just close the window, losing the page you wanted to keep open. It's after a big crash, or closing a tab you wanted to leave open, that you may find yourself thinking, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I could just run that one page I wanted to view in its own little browser application?"

If the rumors are to be believed, the as-of-yet-unreleased Safari 4 will include a feature to do just that: convert any particular site you're viewing into its own standalone browsing application. These mini-programs are known as site-specific browsers (SSBs). But who knows when Safari 4 may be released, or even if the rumors are true? The good news is that there's a free solution available today that does the same thing--as long as you're running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), that is. Fluid is a program, built around , the open-source Web-browser engine that also powers Apple's Safari web browser, that converts any URL into its own Cocoa application, with a trivial amount of effort.

Fluid is incredibly easy to use--its entire interface is a single dialog box with two text fields and two drop-down menus. You enter the URL you'd like to convert into an application, provide a name for the new application, specify where you'd like the application to be saved, and then pick an icon that you'd like to use for the application.

You can tell Fluid to use the site's favicon (that small icon that appears to the left of the site's name in your browser's URL bar), or point it to an icon file on your computer. There's even with nearly 300 ready-to-use icon images. When everything is to your liking, click Create, and a second or so later, you'll have your own SSB.

Once created, you launch your SSB as you would any other program on your Mac, and the site you specified will then open in its own window. Because your SSB is a real program, it will appear in the Dock, can be stored in the sidebar or toolbar, and even has its own preferences interface--found in the usual spot under the application's name in your menu bar.

That preferences dialog is relatively full-featured, and offers some tweaks not found in most other OS X programs. As seen in the image at right, you can control how the program's windows behave when you use Spaces; and you can change the window's appearance, make it float above all other windows (or embed it in the desktop, below everything else), set its shadow on or off, apply a degree of opacity, and even specify that the window can be dragged from anywhere, not just the top or bottom of the window.