First, a disclaimer: At this point, Stainless is really just a technology demo and is likely to stay that way (though we might add some novel ideas we have for bookmark, history and download management).
So, why did we create yet-another-
WebKit-browser?
Because building a multi-process browser for
OS X was a cool way to leverage the multi-processing technology we developed for one of our products,
Hypercube .
Judging from
Chromium's
OS X Detailed Status page, the Mac version of
Chrome will use a WebCore-rendered bitmap to pass between the browser and rendering processes. The strategy we use in Hypercube (and now Stainless) is far less ambitious, but a whole lot easier to do and, thus, available today for your downloading pleasure
(for
Leopard only, sorry).
Welcome to Stainless
Thanks for downloading Stainless: a multi-process browser for OS X inspired by Google Chrome.
Each tab in Stainless runs independently in a separate process, which means:
- Increased performance.
Slow page loads (especially due to plugins such as Flash) can't affect the responsiveness of the browser or other tabs.
- Increased stability.
Crashed pages can't bring down the browser or other tabs.
- Decreased memory usage.
Once a tab is closed, the memory for that session is completely freed to the system.
In addition, like Chrome, Stainless has tabs that can be dragged between windows, a unified address and search bar, and a private browsing mode.
But please remember that, at this time, Stainless is really just a technology demo. As such, it's missing a number of features you'd expect to find in a production ready browser: a download manager, a bookmarks manager, font and text handling, page search, view source, etc.
Still, we think our multi-process solution is pretty cool; and we hope you think so, too.
Have fun, and let us know what you think!
