Launch any browser/OS right from your desktop with Sauce for Mac

http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/12/introducing-sauce-for-mac-the-easiest-way-to-launch-any-browser-right-from-your-mac/

by awilson820 • 14 years ago

196 64 14 years ago

sauceio.com

samuel02• 14 years ago

Does anyone have experience with this? It would be interesting if this is finally a good solution that really works.

meltzerj• 14 years ago

yeah would like to know this as well. If this works and is accurate, it could be huge for IE testing.

jlipps3• 14 years ago

I was part of the team that built this and I can say from extensive use that it does work. It doesn't do everything that I'd love for it to do (for example, we're still working on supporting higher screen resolutions), but it's a really solid start. Please do check it out, and let us know what would make it more awesome!

kevingadd• 14 years ago

It's great for manual testing, just be aware that the performance of the machines they host the browsers on is REALLY bad, to the point that it may make it hard to do testing of HTML5 apps. For basic website testing it works pretty great.

jlipps3• 14 years ago

The application is in some sense basically a wrapper around a VNC connection. It's likely that the performance issues you're seeing are due to VNC latency rather than the power of the virtual machines themselves or the hardware they run on (which is pretty beefy). But your point is well made: given this architecture you can't really watch video or do things that require high framerates.

leeloo3• 14 years ago

I used it - pretty straight forward and has the IE versions.

kyrra• 14 years ago

I was a bit worried about how this would work on a company intranet. I know my IT network security people are pretty paranoid about bridge networks and all that. Looking at Sauce Connect[1], they recommend to put the service on a dedicated machine on your intranet that you can zone off so it only has access to the parts of the network you want to allow.

Seems like a decent solution to allow a running a cloud service behind a firewall.

[1] http://saucelabs.com/docs/connect

highwind• 14 years ago

Still. I feel like the price is way too much. The recommended plan is $149/month. For the long run, buying a decent machine and running your own virtual machines would be cheaper.

Someone prove me wrong.

leeloo3• 14 years ago

"recommended" doesn't mean - must buy. i use the $12 a month and it gets me what i need.

awilson820• 14 years ago

What you're seeing is actually pricing for our automated testing service. Sauce for Mac is either free (30 mins of testing/mo) or $12/mo (for unlimited minutes against all browsers). It also comes included with all the testing plans on that page.

toyg• 14 years ago

Your own VMs have to be created, stored and maintained. For small shops, managing even a relatively small catalogs of images can be quite a time-consuming process, let alone building multiple automated test processes.

durin42• 14 years ago

Maintaining selenium testing infrastructure is hell. Absolute hell. Sauce means you're not wasting time on that. I've watched people at both of my companies blow TONS of time on this, for relatively little results.

(Disclaimer: some of my friends work at Sauce.)

admc5• 14 years ago

Greetings, we just made some changes, ran the tests and deployed an update to the Sauce for Mac launch page -- it should now be clear that you can use the desktop app to your heart's content for $12/mo. http://saucelabs.com/mac

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone.

bitcartel• 14 years ago

There might be OS licensing issues involved in having people launch a VM running Windows or Mac OS X. Perhaps some of those costs are factored in?

adrianmsmith• 14 years ago

I've had great experience with http://crossbrowsertesting.com/, it costs $29.95 per month. I can't recommend it enough. You can't start a VM from a desktop program but all it takes is a few clicks in the browser, and everything works like a charm.

azio• 14 years ago

Just tried it and it worked really well.

criswell• 14 years ago

How does this do against something like BrowserStack? I love BrowserStack, but it can be really slow and unresponsive at times.

leeloo3• 14 years ago

much faster for me.

taylorwc• 14 years ago

Looks interesting, but can't you already do this in Chrome using User Agent Overrides (under Developer Tools)?

gyardley• 14 years ago

No matter what user agent you use, Chrome won't show you how your page looks in a non-WebKit layout engine like Gecko, Trident, or Presto.

arb99• 14 years ago

Different browsers (well, their rendering engine) will render html differently. The reason ie6 got so much slack years ago was because it didn't render 'correctly' at all. Web developers need to test in different browsers (/different versions) to check everyone is seeing the same thing.

overriding the UA just shows if the server serves different html to different clients

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Nope; just today I ran into a bug where a click was being handled differently in an iPhone than it was in Chrome.

ommunist• 14 years ago

Hmmm.... A very spicy plan is so spicy that it is better worth investing into own VM testing park. Mechanical Turks are also here.

admc5• 14 years ago

Greetings, we updated the page at http://saucelabs.com/mac to clarify the fact that you get unlimited usage of our VM's for $12 a month. Sorry for the confusion, I think it's a fair and reasonable price.

suyash• 14 years ago

Sauce has a great team of smart engineers. Very cool product! I'm waiting to come to your next meetup where you can talk about this.

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

-1 for forcing me to use the Mac App Store — the copy on the landing page you sent me to made it sound like there was a way to download it directly. Before I could download it I was presented with multiple alerts and pages of bullshit regarding my Apple ID and the App Store terms of service. Not a good experience.

-1 for not having a link to create a new account from the first dialogue box in the app. I can either log in or start without an account, but not create a new one? There's also no hint as to where I should go to make a new account. I clicked "forgot key" and worked it out from there.

-1 for not explaining the "open source" plan very well. What does "public" mean? Does that mean anybody can watch videos of whatever I'm working on?

-1 for making the credentials I actually need to use the app non-obvious. You should know that I'm coming from your app when I sign up for a new account, and when I'm done signing up, show me my account key in big, fat, auto-copyable text, instead of hiding it two screens later.

-1 for not automatically taking me to my localhost URL after Sauce Connect initializes. I had to say I wanted to go to a localhost URL, wait for Sauce Connect to initialize, and then try to connect to the URL again.

But once I got the thing working, it's really great! And I totally forgot that display:inline-block didn't work as recently as IE7 :(

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

Folks, this website is not called "internet love fest". Please stop downvoting me for giving honest and complete feedback of my experience with the app.

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

I didn't up-vote your OP, but I up-voted this. I hate that dissenting opinions often get relegated to the bottom of the comment list.

jlipps3• 14 years ago

I work at Sauce and I upvoted your comment because I think it's great feedback.

But "internet love fest news" sounds like a great Show HN.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

Let this be your lesson that presentation does, in fact, matter. Whatever your intent, your post reads as an excessively negative scorecard.

And nobody wants to read excessively negative content, man. It's a drag.

heed• 14 years ago

It's also not called "let's complain about downvotes like a redditor."

ck22• 14 years ago

IE7 can do inline-block but it's iffy, try giving the element "haslayout" via zoom:1 in css

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Feedback is great! Everyone loves feedback, even if it's negative, it lets us improve and move on. How you presented your feedback was completely and utterly terrible, and turned it from constructive criticism to a situation where you looked like a bit of an ass.

admc5• 14 years ago

Sauce for Mac is my project, and I totally appreciate the feedback. Fixes for all those comments are going directly into the queue.

FWIW - it's an open source project and you can always directly get the latest download from github here: https://github.com/saucelabs/sauce-for-mac/downloads

We realize the signup flow is a nightmare, the rules of the app store are not nice :-(

0x0• 14 years ago

It's really nice that you put up the code. :)

I browsed around quickly and noticed a lot of calls to /bin/bash and curl via a system() equivalent. That looks a bit dangerous, hope the arguments never contain `special shell characters`. :O

https://github.com/saucelabs/sauce-for-mac/blob/master/Sourc...

lancefisher• 14 years ago

I would suggest making it available outside of the app store. I work for a large company, and we simply cannot use software from the app store since it is tied to an individual Apple ID, and the company has no procurement process for app store software. In addition to that, there are many people who would prefer to install software without having to use the app store.

ChiperSoft• 14 years ago

display:inline-block;zoom:1;*display:inline;

As long as the element has a fixed width it will behave exactly like inline block in IE7.

undershirt• 14 years ago

I would like to see this for Nintendo Wii-U's HTML5-compliant browser.

netfire• 14 years ago

I like the concept but the product doesn't seem to work well (at least the free version), perhaps due to HN traffic. I can't connect to most websites and the ones I can connect to take a long time.

As for your website, I agree with some of the other comments. Its not really obvious that you have a free plan or what that offers unless you read closely. I'd suggest you move that up into your pricing grid.

I'd also move the Sauce with Mouse row up to the top. I see your main value for users (or at least starting point) being manual testing. Focus less on automating and scaling up to huge numbers of tests. Get me in the door and familiar with the product, then upsell me once I'm convinced your product is awesome.

Best of luck to you. I'll check back in a few days to see if things are working better.

EGreg• 14 years ago

This is excellent! How does this compare against BrowserStack (ignoring price, of course)

ek• 14 years ago

Sauce does Mac OS X virtualization using some patches Alexander Graf and René Rebe helped them bring up to date, which they've released (see http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/08/apple-sauce-android-sau...).

I tried hacking their patches into a recent snapshot of the KVM tree but there were some issues. I sort of wonder if anyone else has managed to get their code working, because it would be a neat hack if so.

hugs2• 14 years ago

Hi, author of that blog post here. I meant to follow up with a more detailed tutorial on how to specifically spin up a Mac VM using those patches. Sorry I haven't done that yet. :-(

jakozaur2• 14 years ago

Good concept, but prefer one of their competitors: https://browserling.com/

+ Web based

+ No account needed to try it

+ Tunnels also available

+ Great blog from one of the founders catonmat.com

admc5• 14 years ago

+ Our browser based testing service is also available at http://saucelabs.com

+ We have an accountless version on the front page, followed by free and open source accounts.

+We have a very secure and mature tunneling system called Sauce Connect: http://www.saucelabs.com/docs/connect

Five minutes of research would have been helpful.

jakozaur2• 14 years ago

My bad. I totally agree with you.

Hmm, you might improve conversion if you put trial button above the fold. Also pre-spinning an instance for demo would be truly awesome.

JacksonGariety• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, this is a horror to sign up for, use, and look at. Any alternatives?

dools• 14 years ago

browserling.com browserstack.com

andybak• 14 years ago

Ignore the app and sign-up on the website. I already had an account for the browser-based testing so I didn't experience the sign-up problems other people are describing.

DandelionRex• 14 years ago

Regarding iOS support.. does this just run the simulators that come with XCode? I have found that the simulators don't do a very good job of reproducing real mobile safari behavior.

hugs2• 14 years ago

Yes, at the moment, it's iPhone and iPad simulators. However, offering testing on real devices, too, is a high priority for us.

ck22• 14 years ago

Well of course we'd like it for windows but I can use my osx emulator for now.

There is also https://browserling.com/ but it can be slow sometimes and has other issues.

sirn• 14 years ago

The Sauce Labs website is really confusing.

- There's no indication that you could login using GitHub.

- There's no (obvious?) way to logout.

- There seems to be no way to login either once you've managed to logout? (without visiting /login directly)

While the product is indeed nice, the website really gives me a bad impression.

aytekin• 14 years ago

As a long time SauceLabs customer I just tried Sauce and I am loving it!

Being able to open multiple browsers at the same time is fantastic. I can launch them at once and take a look at them. We have been using browserstack but constantly closing and opening different browsers is a lot of work. Screenshot: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/132641/screenshots/sauce.png

It also seems to be faster compare to browser based solutions.

marojejian• 14 years ago

Looks great!

Launch any browser/OS right from your desktop with Sauce for Mac

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