14 DAY TRIAL // Developed by the folks at Mesa Dynamics, Stainless is the simplest and most useful web browser you could ask for. Released to the public in September, Stainless has already seen six updates, although the software is still beta material. The latest version to date brings new additions, as well as bug fixes.
Whether you're the owner of a beat-up, low-specced Mac, or you simply need a clean, uncluttered web browsing experience, Stainless is just what you need. The new web browser supports some of the features found in Google's recently-launched Chrome, such as an unified address and search bar, draggable tabs between windows, and a private stealth browser mode.
Even though Stainless can be tried out by anyone owning an Intel or PPC Mac, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is required. Tiger users may see their OS supported in future versions of Stainless. However, 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 is coming short of several other features you'd expect to find in a production-ready one, such as a bookmarks manager, font and text handling, page search, view source, and others. It's also “likely to stay” just a technology demo for some time, Mesa Dynamics says. The multi-process feature lets users hit command + R to see a “process manager,” just like in Chrome. Other keyboard shortcuts include command + T to open a new tab, or command + W to close a tab and, eventually, the main window.
Mesa Dynamics has added Web Inspector support in Stainless 0.4, 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.
The makers of the simple web browser for Mac claim they've created it because it was “a cool way to leverage the multi-processing technology” they developed for one of their other apps – Hypercube.