Fluid.app

Date Modified Tags OS X / Fluid / Safari

Fluid.app (the paid version, or the free version starting with macOS Sierra) is a handy OS X solution to keep your social media and banking cookies separate from your regular Safari instance. It lets you create a new app specific to each web site (a site-specific browser).

I only have a few minor gripes, which I reported to the author a while back:

  • Error messages for slashes in the browser name aren't intuitive. (The browser name needs to be a valid directory name for the app bundle.)
  • There isn't a way to set up defaults for each browser instance.

Favicons (and the higher-resolution PNG icons) are used for the app icon, although sometimes the Finder icon will not update if the app destination folder is a stack in the dock.

To address the defaults problem, I wrote this small script:

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#!/bin/bash -e

plist="$1"
cp -p "$plist" "$plist".orig

defaults write "$plist" FUToolbarShown -bool TRUE
defaults write "$plist" FUUseSeparateCookieJar -bool TRUE
defaults write "$plist" SUEnableAutomaticChecks -bool TRUE

After creating the new site app, you pass the preferences plist file to the script (I recommend dragging the plist from the Finder, but any way that escapes spaces should work):

./fluid-defaults.sh ~/Library/Preferences/com.fluidapp.FluidApp.YouTube.plist

Happy browsing.

Addendum - macOS Sierra (10.12)

With macOS Sierra (10.12), the latest Fluid.app defaults to separate cookies (which is no longer a premium feature). However, if you upgrade from OS X 10.11, you might be stuck with site-specific browsers based on Fluid 1.8.5, and you might run across an issue which appears as though cookies have been disabled across the board.

The short answer (staring me in the face at the top of http://fluidapp.com) is to upgrade your main copy of Fluid.app to 1.8.6, which has macOS Sierra fixes, and then rebuild each of your site-specific browsers. (If you rename the old browser apps, and recreate the new ones with the same names, they should inherit the preferences. I kept the old browser apps around long enough to save off their icons, then deleted them.)

The maddening part was that only certain sites exhibited the problem. Google Calendar worked just fine, as did the Google account page within that app, but both Gmail and Google+ got into a loop where they claimed that cookies were not enabled (but would not allow me to click on the logout button). Another well-known social media site did not exhibit any problems.