Great idea that needs some more polish

This app serves a very specific, but often-needed role. Having a persistent floating window for media with variable transparency is useful in many situations. However, the app could use some more interface design improvement. Some parts of the app lack retina-quality assets, so they look a little blurry. There are no preferences and clicking the menu bar icon just focuses or unfocuses on the Fluid browser. There are many helpful functions the developers could put in the menu bar icon. For example, it would be nice if you could pause or mute from the menu bar icon, in addition to just focusing on the app.

However, my biggest complaint is that the app’s user interface does not follow standard OS X user interface guidelines. The app just doesn’t really look like it “fits” in with the rest of OS X. All of the best Mac apps have a very native look and feel. Fluid looks very out-of-place. The tool bar uses custom interface elements instead of native elements, and the icons aren’t labelled so you don’t know what they do until you click them (and even then it’s not always obvious). Of course, you don’t see most of those elements when you’re watching content, but it’s still an clunky experience. The user interface design is just subpar overall. It’d be great if the developers totally redesigned the interface using native OS X interface elements and followed Apple’s human interface guidelines. It shouldn’t be too difficult considering how simple the UI is.

It’s also just kind of buggy and needs all-around improvement. For example, the menu controls on YouTube videos sometimes get stuck on the screen and can’t be hidden unless you reload the video. You can’t access the YouTube sidebar for some reason (I think this is because Fluid appears to pose as a mobile device, which is a hacky workaround that seems to cause problems).

MartineLizardo about Fluid Browser