While Mesa Dynamics still has version 4.0 of its lightweight web browser on offer, Stainless now has a more attractive-looking icon. Meanwhile, the development team's promise to bring as much of Chrome to the Mac as possible appears to be on still.

The free web browser that supports some of the features found in Google's web browser, Chrome, was released in September. Sporting an unified address and search bar, draggable tabs between windows, and a private stealth browsing mode, Stainless can be tried out by anyone owning a Mac (Intel, PPC) with Mac OS X 10.5 installed.

Whether you're the owner of a beat-up, low-specced Mac, or you simply need a clean, uncluttered web browsing experience, Stainless offers an unified address and search bar, draggable tabs between windows, and a private stealth browser mode.

However, since it's still being heavily tested, Stainless should be used with caution, or at least should not be relied upon entirely. Furthermore, one of its main lacking features is a built-in download manager, something we're used to seeing with almost every web browser out there.

The free web browser comes short of several other features you'd expect to find in a production-ready web browsing app, such as a bookmarks manager, font and text handling, page search, view source, and others. The development team emphasizes Stainless' multi-process feature, which has individual tabs – processes working inside the browser side by side, increasing its stability.

Mesa Dynamics admitted it developed Stainless because building a multi-process browser for OS X was “a cool way to leverage the multi-processing technology” the company had developed for Hypercube, another Mesa Dynamics app.

With version 4.0 out, Stainless now has Web Inspector support, as well as a deferred plugin loading in hidden tabs. Areas where bugs have been fixed include server certificate error handling, JavaScript window sizing across processes, server memory leak, and runaway threads, as well as client messaging collision deadlocks. You may download the free, lightweight browser using the link below.

Download Stainless 4.0 (Free)

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is required to run the browser. Both Intel and PPC Macs are compatible.