Original author(s) Development status Active Operating system | Stable release 1.8.3 | |
Initial release December 9, 2007 (2007-12-09) | ||
Fluid is a WebKit-based site-specific browser (SSB) for Mac OS X created by Todd Ditchendorf. It has often been compared to Mozilla Prism and mentioned in Lifehacker, TechCrunch, 43 Folders, the 37 Signals blog, and on InfoWorld as a way to make web applications more like native desktop applications.
Contents
It comes natively with support for userscripts (like Greasemonkey for Mozilla Firefox) and userstyles (like Stylish for Mozilla Firefox) for the modification of the look and feel of web applications. It also integrates with Apple's Cover Flow utility.
Open-sourcing
On March 18, 2010, Fluid developer Todd Ditchendorf announced on his weblog that he was open-sourcing the browser-portion of Fluid (also used by the Cruz browser) under the Apache License as Fluidium.
On June 7, 2010, Todd Ditchendorf also open-sourced the "SSB creator" portion of Fluid, also known as Fluid.app.
1.0 milestone
On May 1, 2011, Fluid 1.0 was released with a completely new codebase. Fluid Apps created with previous versions of Fluid cannot be updated via software update and SSBs have to be re-created with Fluid 1.0 (to transition to version 1.0 and later). While version 1.0 is still a free app, a Fluid License can be purchased which will unlock extra features (some previously included by default in previous versions). On July 4, 2011, version 1.2 was released and featured compatibility with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.