Sebastian Succeeds with Cruz
Hi. I’m Sebastian and I’m a new blogger for IMP. I love free stuff and I haven’t paid for any software (other than iWork) on my Mac.
Up until a while ago, I was using Safari as my web browser of choice – mainly because it came pre-installed on my Macbook. I have recently switched to Cruz, a free browser from Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid.
Cruz is slick, fast and customisable, when you launch it for the first time it will look almost exactly like Safari. It”s when you go into the settings that you see the magic. You get some general settings like homepage etc. but one of the really cool things is the Appearance. There are 3 skins to choose from; Default (Grey), Mobile Me (olive) and HUD (black), I prefer HUD. You can also set the Spaces settings and even the window opacity.
Cruz has tabs, Java, pop-up blockers and cookie deflectors to help make your web experience better. It runs on WebKit and is currently at version 0.1. Cruz has a very clever feature where the address bar has shortcuts built into it for searching. This means that instead of going to the Google Maps site to search for a place, you can just type “gm San Francisco, CA” or “gm Coffee near Heathrow” into the address bar. Not only is there Google Maps, there’s Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, Twitter, Friendfeed, Cuil and heaps more. If you find that there’s a search service that isn’t included, you can add the search string and it works perfectly. I have set one up for Wikipedia so that if I type “w London” it will take me to the corresponding Wikipedia page.
Also, because Cruz is so similar to Fluid, you have Browsabrowsa and Thumbnails as plug-ins which is really cool. Browsabrowsa puts a small tab/window thing at the side of your main window that you can set to go to a specific site. I have one setup to go to the iPhone Digg page so that the moment something happens, I can see it.
If you feel that it improves your web experience, you can have thumbnails of pages displayed in Google search results. It took me a while to discover all of the features, like bookmarks, because many things are hidden away deep inside sub-menus.
Cruz seems like a funky browser, but I think it still has a way to come before it will be adopted by the mainstream public.
Cool but I'm not sure if I'm going to switch!
This is an excellent browser Sebastian, thanks for posting about it. Just downloaded it. Absolutely loving how you can type in what site you want to search and the terms you want into the address bar, already added wikipedia and youtube custom ones. The Browsa plug-in is very nice too. And welcome to IMP!