Name: Fluid
Price: 5.00 USD
Rating: 4.1 (61 reviews)

Fluid overview

Fluid gives your favorite Web apps a home on your Mac OS X Desktop.

Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or an insert-your-favorite-webapp-here fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site 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 Web apps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your OS X desktop including Dock icon, menu bar, and logical separation from your other Web browsing activity.

How does it work? Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you'd like to run in a site-specific browser. Then provide a name, click 'Create' and you'll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you've just created. Use it to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other webapp as a separate desktop application. 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.

What’s new in version 2.1.2

Version 2.1.2:

Fix:

Clicking a Bookmark in the Bookmarks bar opens the link in the current tab

4.1

(89 Reviews of Fluid)

Comments
User Ratings

Robio

Apr 26 2020

2.1.2

4.0

Version: 2.1.2

I've been using Fluid for several years to make light-weight, free-standing apps for social media (can't follow me now, Facebook!), various Google Drive accounts, Workflowy and another note-keeping app, and various mail accounts. I've tested three other apps that do basically the same thing, and Fluid 2 is the clear winner for me: Its stand-alone apps are smaller and faster, tabbed browsing is better, it remembers its state between sessions (unlike fancier-looking, more expensive competitors that abandon all but one tab), it fully compatible with standard browser-navigation keyboard shortcuts (unlike fancier-looking, more expensive competitors that only switch tabs with a mouse click). I bought the pro version just to support development (the additional features weren't of interest to me). I just hope the developer keeps at it, seeing as it's been almost 2 years since the last update, and his blog hasn't had a post in 5 years.

steveh2011

Oct 17 2019

3.0

I like Fluid when it works; then, it is an invaluable tool. What I don't like is that when there is an issue, there is absolutely zero support for customers who paid for the full version. Having come up against an issue in August, I emailed the author. It's now October and zero, zip, nada response. Now left searching for an alternative.

iMacWare

Jun 22 2019

Fluid is nice, runs on webkit and works with Adguard.

Cowicide

May 5 2019

Something going on with WebKit and Android Messages. Fluid worked great with it until Google did some kind of update and the Fluid app is broken. I created a new Fluid app with their new url and same problem.

The interface goes nuts when attempting to alternate between different people and unable to scroll through text messages. It's just frozen on a few text messages and won't scroll.

I built a basic WebKit browser in Xcode and got the same results. Safari works perfect and so does Android Messages Desktop, the electron app:

https://github.com/chrisknepper/android-messages-desktop

Hopefully an update of some kind to Fluid in the future can make it compatible again.

Uncoy

Mar 16 2019

Where can I get a v2.x.x which works on El Capitan? Paid user here who's had to abandon his heavily used Fluid apps over the last two years as they don't work. It's really obnoxious that there's no update notifications in Fluid v1 which work to let us know about the new version. Fluid has been one of my top five favourite software tools but not knowing about the update and not being able to use it and the lack of distribution of info about the update is pretty frustrating.