It’s been a long time since… no, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Welcome to the first official Razor in the Apple article at Smoking Apples.
Razor in the Apple is a new series dealing with bleeding-edge software for the Mac. You know, the kind of pre-beta, even pre-alpha software that you don’t run on your main Mac because it might explode in a cloud of bugs. We’ve decided to risk a crash or two to make sure you get to see what’s out there without having to put your own machine at risk.
Now that that’s out of the way, where was I? Oh yes. It’s been a long time since Smoking Apples first reviewed Mesa Dynamics’ Stainless, a Chrome-inspired Mac-native web browser based on the Webkit rendering engine. In the ten months since we got our first look, Stainless’s version has gone from 0.1 to 0.6.5. I decided to grab a developer preview (making the official version 0.6.5w12) and see what exactly has changed.
The short answer is “a lot”. The first thing I noticed about Stainless was its stability. I’m easing gently into this whole bleeding-edge software thing—Stainless is way more stable and feature-rich than the Chrome for Mac developer release or the Chromium daily builds. In my personal testing, neither Stainless as a whole nor any of its tabs crashed even once.
Like Chrome, Stainless is built so that each tab is an independent process, meaning that no one tab can crash the browser or slow down the other tabs. Also like Chrome, Stainless puts the tabs above the address/search bar, instead of below. As a young browser, Stainless has been built with the ability to reorder tabs, move them between windows, and drag them out to create new windows firmly in mind. Most browsers had that feature added on after they were already mature products, and it shows. Stainless does tabs right. It even marks private browsing windows and tabs red, so you can be completely certain of your privacy.
Colored private browsing tabs make it easy to be certain of your privacy.
Another area where Stainless shows its youth is its bookmark “shelf”. In contrast to the bookmark bar in Firefox or Safari, Stainless puts all its bookmarks in a vertical shelf along the left side of each browser window. This shelf can be hidden when not in use, which lets you reclaim space you’d lose in most browsers. You can create bookmark folders (or “groups”) in Stainless, as well; they expand to show all the items they contain when clicked.
Stainless uses an innovative collapsible vertical bookmark shelf to save space.
The newest selling point for Stainless, though, is its ability to create “single-session” tabs. Created using a special menubar command (or hotkey), these allow you to be logged into the same site under different usernames in different tabs. For example, if you have several Gmail (or Facebook, or Twitter) accounts, you could be logged into each of them in a different tab within the same window. Kind of like what a Fluid app achieves, but only in the same browser window. You can even create bookmarks that open a given site with a specific profile logged in. This feature is definitely useful for people who wear a number of different hats.
Single-session tabs allow you to log into multiple accounts on the same service side by side.
When SA last looked at Stainless, it needed more preferences, a download manager, bookmarks, in-page search, the ability to view source, and less clumsy tab handling. I’ve already mentioned the vastly improved tabs and bookmarks, but it’s worth noting that more preferences, a download manager, in-page search, and a view source feature have also been implemented. The View Source is strangely implemented—the source appears in place of the page it’s for, rather than in a separate window, and if the Back button is pressed Stainless shows the source for the previous page instead of the rendered page—but it’s there.
The Stainless developers have resolved a number of issues mentioned in Smoking Apples’ previous review.
Stainless can still use some work; it lacks stand-out, flashy features like Firefox’s “awesome bar” or Safari’s Top Sites. But for those who appreciate stability, privacy, and the ability to have multiple accounts simultaneously logged in on the same website, Stainless is already a perfect browser. Since I downloaded it expecting it to cause sparks to fly from my MacBook, that’s saying something. I definitely expect to see more good things from this application.
Stainless uses a nifty overlay to show information about links when the status bar is hidden.
You can download the latest stable build of Stainless or alternatively you can download the current latest developer release here. Each comes as a svelte ~600KB zip file.
What Next?
The first Razor in the Apple didn’t draw much blood, but don’t worry, there’s a lot more unstable stuff out there ready to take down my Mac. If there’s an application you’re curious about but don’t want to run on your home machine, let us know about it in the comments and I’ll give it a shot!
Note to developers: We’re always curious about the latest project you’re working on. If you’ve got an application in the pre-alpha stage that you’d like people to know about, send it my way!
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Seems that there is a gain a lot of web browsers kicking about out there (Safari, Fire Fox, Chrome, Opera and more). Do we really need another one? I have to admit I really like Safari so it has to be a Safari beater to make it worth my time to download.
Is Stainless faster or slower relative to other browsers? Does it handle secure sites (like online banking). And why call it Stainless?
But otherwise I’m always pleased to hear about new and exciting stuff
Wow, I guess I somehow failed to mention that. Stainless renders *fast*. I’m used to Firefox 3.5 with a few addons, which is about as fast as Safari 4 in my (very subjective, very limited) testing. Stainless is faster than either. It handles secure sites just fine, but it doesn’t *show* that a site is secure in the URL bar the way Firefox and Safari do.
I like Stainless because it has features that none of the other browsers you mentioned do, like the single-session tabs and session-aware bookmarks. With that said, Firefox is still my default browser; Stainless is useful for certain things, but there are features I demand from my main browser that only Chrome and Firefox have so far.
Well, I have been monitoring the memory usage of other browsers. Safari, Chrome take up quite a bit…i have never seen memory availability more than 1GB out of 4 GB I have. The minute I started using Stainless + other usual applications, I find the memory usage is pretty low and availability is always more than 1.4+ GB. Which has been interesting as my applications have more space and I love the feature that every tab is a separate process. For now I am using stainless and i am enjoying it and result my faster mac. I might be completely wrong and may be something else which has been hogging my RAM, but for now things are in order…
Wow, really impressed; it has improved a lot!
I’ll definitely be taking a look at Stainless when I get back home.
Thanks for the reminder, SA.
I have to admit that Stainless is really fast than many browser like safari and firefox. I’m missing the clear cookies and flash cookies function. it’s been great so far
Hmm let’s talk about this line a little:
“…no one tab can crash the browser or slow down the other tabs.”
Let’s take a common example. If one starts Photoshop and runs it for a while, some apps might get slow since most RAM will be dedicated to Photoshop (yes, there is a setting for that). Photoshop, being a totally different process than hmm . . Safari for example. It will still slow it down. I’m talking from my own experience.
Now let’s take get back on the subject. If one tab in Stainless or Chromium has a memory leak (be it the browser or a plugin such as Flash), that could take a lot of resources from every other process. In result, one tab can “slow down the other tabs” and the hole computer.
I’m saying this just for the sake of discussion.
Damn, I keep reordering words in my mind when thinking of a sentence, but I forget to stop typing and that’s what makes my English so bad. I should seriously start double-checking before clicking “Submit”.
Corrections: “Now let’s get back” without the “take”
I believe it’s more like you have 20 tabs open, one of them crashes, but you’re still able to force quit that tab while leaving the rest of the windows open. It’s also much better for memory management as I’m pretty sure browsers lose track of how many tabs are open, and how many were closed. With these independent process tabs, once you close the tab that memory unit is immediately given back to the system.
/from a totally non technical point of view.
Yes, of course. I completely understand the concept of Google Chrome and the others that followed it by using independent processes for each tab and now even for plugins (Safari 4 on Snow Leopard).
I’m just saying that by taking that sentence word by word, it is logically incorrect. If one tab is using a lot of resources for .. some JavaScript for example, the others might run a little slower since there will be less available resources for them.
Unless they limit each process to a certain percentage of CPU cycles and/or RAM, it is impossible for one tab not to have an influence on the other tabs.
Do you understand where I’m trying to get?
Never come across Stainless before and have so far stayed away from Chrome – want to give it a go but it all seems crazy complicated to install. Particularly like the feature of being logged in to the same site under two different user accounts (parallel sessions). Am using to post comment here as one concern was whether it used Apple’s built in spell checker (I’ve never been able to have success with Firefox). It all seems to work very well.
gonna try this coz i ahte having to restart firefox every few hours when my system starts crawling.. unrelatedly – u guys got any good hackintosh resources? – being razor and all