It seems that by the time Google announce the Mac version of Chrome, half the metal names in the periodic table should be taken. We’ve already had “CrossOver Chromium” and now Mesa Dynamics have given us a Chrome inspired, Safari based browser—Stainless.
Multi-process Browser: Initial Impressions
This was one of the innovative Chrome features that excited me. Crashed pages can’t bring down the browser or other tabs. Each tab in Stainless runs independently in a separate process, so you get increased performance and stability.
For each tab you load, Stainless starts a new process “StainlessClient”. Each of these processes take up about 18 MB of RAM. So if you open 5 tabs, then the total memory usage is around 100 MB including that of the app itself. Testing Safari and Firefox (with five tabs) took less than 90 MB of memory. Nevertheless this is good as the memory for that tab is immediately freed to the system when you close it. Also, if a page loads slowly (due to flash or embedded items), it doesn’t affect the performance of the other tabs.
Other Chrome inspired features include tabs above address bar (which some might say is bad interface design), tabs that can be dragged between windows (clumsy and isn’t smooth as in Safari), a unified address and search bar, and porn private browsing mode. Unlike Safari however, in Stainless, Private Browsing windows operate separate from the rest of the browser. So you may do your regular surfing, while having a private window or tab (coloured red) which does not record your moves. One weird thing I noticed is, it automatically signed in to some sites without having to enter my UserID and password. How can it access to my Keychain without my consent?
The developers warn it’s a “technology demo” (eh?) and will continue to stay that way for some time. You really can’t use this as your default browser for there are a lot of things which need work—a download manager, bookmarks, page search, view source, clumsy tabs handling, etc. In fact if you look into the Preferences, you can only enter your home page URL and specify the search engine.
Still Stainless performs better than CrossOver Chromium. Download the 0.1 version (just 800 KB!) and have a go at “Multi Process Architecture” if only see what the fuss is about.
