Launch any browser/OS right from your desktop with Sauce for Mac | Hacker News Reader

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

sauceio.com

196 pointsawilson82064 comments

-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 :(

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.

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.

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.

I assumed that's what the newest iTunes release in Russia was supposed to be.

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.

I got the same feeling. Although I agree with some of the points made I think it was the way it was worded and the "-1's" that came off as really distasteful.

Didn't bother me, got the point across rather well I thought. At least he didn't put the negative ones in red because that would have really hurt someone's feelings.

Easy there, killer. This isn't some feel-good bullshit about maybe hurting someone's feelings; it's about the atmosphere we want our community to have.

We're all social creatures. Super negative comments bring everybody down, not just whoever they're directed at-- and it's easy to be both honest and pleasant to read.

The point I was trying to make is that his statements didn't bother me and I fail to see how it would any other, I admit just my opinion though. I didn't find them to be "super negative" so this is just a disagreement over how "mean" he was being. Therefore my comment red and people's feelings. I feel that a complaint over his negative ones is overblown and doesn't drag every one down. You may disagree with me but if someone feels bummed about negative ones preceding a statement then I have to feel they are easily bummed out I guess, since easily offended doesn't fit.

I agree that it's easy to be both honest and pleasant to read but there can be disagreements over the definitions of both of those. Plus, sometimes being honest doesn't lend to being pleasant.

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

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

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.

Irony: feedback on the feedback is unwelcome.

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 :-(

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

This needs to be clarified on sauceio.com/mac. It's very confusing right now to go to pricing and not understand what it's for.

Whoa, this is news to me, I checked out sauce a month or so ago and came to the same conclusion as highwind. $12/mo is something that I would be more interested in. You should make that way more obvious. I haven't fully harnessed the power of TDD and it isn't used at my current job so I have no use for it. On the other hand the ability to test websites on different browsers is very important to my job and for $12/mo it's something I can afford to get for myself to use for work and personal projects.

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.

No one said you need to test every browser. I mean, pragmatically speaking, basically you need to test the major versions of IE on Windows if you're already on a Mac.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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

+ 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.

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.

Thanks for the input, feel free to email me admc@saucelabs.com with your account and I'll happily give you some extra minutes to check everything out.

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.

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. :-(

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

much faster for me.

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

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.

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

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

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

browserling.com browserstack.com

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.

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

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

Looks great!

Just tried it and it worked really well.

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