7 ms·

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

196 points by awilson820 14y ago

samuel02 14y ago
Does anyone have experience with this? It would be interesting if this is finally a good solution that really works.
- meltzerj 14y ago
  yeah would like to know this as well. If this works and is accurate, it could be huge for IE testing.
- jlipps 14y 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 14y 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.
  - jlipps 14y 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.
leeloo 14y ago
I used it - pretty straight forward and has the IE versions.
kyrra 14y 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 http://saucelabs.com/docs/connect
- highwind 14y 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.
  - leeloo 14y ago
    "recommended" doesn't mean - must buy. i use the $12 a month and it gets me what i need.
  - awilson820 14y 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.
    - johns 14y ago
      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.
    - joshstrange 14y ago
      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.
azio 14y ago
Just tried it and it worked really well.
criswell 14y ago
How does this do against something like BrowserStack? I love BrowserStack, but it can be really slow and unresponsive at times.
- leeloo 14y ago
  much faster for me.
taylorwc 14y ago
Looks interesting, but can't you already do this in Chrome using User Agent Overrides (under Developer Tools)?
- gyardley 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- admc 14y ago
  Greetings, we updated the page at http://saucelabs.com/mac 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 14y 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.
beatpanda 14y 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 :(
- beatpanda 14y 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.
  - jlipps 14y 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.
    - smokinjoe 14y ago
      I assumed that's what the newest iTunes release in Russia was supposed to be.
  - andrewfelix 14y ago
undershirt 14y ago
I would like to see this for Nintendo Wii-U's HTML5-compliant browser.
netfire 14y 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 14y ago
This is excellent! How does this compare against BrowserStack (ignoring price, of course)
ek 14y 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-sauce/ 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.
- hugs 14y 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. :-(
jakozaur 14y ago
Good concept, but prefer one of their competitors: https://browserling.com/ https://browserling.com/ + Web based + No account needed to try it + Tunnels also available + Great blog from one of the founders catonmat.com
- admc 14y ago
  + Our browser based testing service is also available at http://saucelabs.com 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 http://www.saucelabs.com/docs/connect Five minutes of research would have been helpful.
  - jakozaur 14y 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.
    - admc 14y ago
      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.
JacksonGariety 14y ago
Unfortunately, this is a horror to sign up for, use, and look at. Any alternatives?
- dools 14y ago
  browserling.com browserstack.com
- andybak 14y 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 14y 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.
- hugs 14y ago
  Yes, at the moment, it's iPhone and iPad simulators. However, offering testing on real devices, too, is a high priority for us.
ck2 14y 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/ https://browserling.com/ but it can be slow sometimes and has other issues.
sirn 14y 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 14y 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 https://dl.dropbox.com/u/132641/screenshots/sauce.png It also seems to be faster compare to browser based solutions.
marojejian 14y ago
Looks great!

196 points by awilson820 14y ago

samuel02 14y ago

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

meltzerj 14y ago
yeah would like to know this as well. If this works and is accurate, it could be huge for IE testing.
jlipps 14y 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 14y 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.
- jlipps 14y 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.

leeloo 14y ago

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

kyrra 14y 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 http://saucelabs.com/docs/connect

highwind 14y 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.
- leeloo 14y ago
  "recommended" doesn't mean - must buy. i use the $12 a month and it gets me what i need.
- awilson820 14y 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.
  - johns 14y ago
    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.
  - joshstrange 14y ago
    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.

azio 14y ago

Just tried it and it worked really well.

criswell 14y ago

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

leeloo 14y ago
much faster for me.

taylorwc 14y ago

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

gyardley 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

admc 14y ago
Greetings, we updated the page at http://saucelabs.com/mac 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 14y 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.

beatpanda 14y 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 :(

beatpanda 14y 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.
- jlipps 14y 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.
  - smokinjoe 14y ago
    I assumed that's what the newest iTunes release in Russia was supposed to be.
- andrewfelix 14y ago

undershirt 14y ago

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

netfire 14y 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 14y ago

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

ek 14y 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-sauce/ 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.

hugs 14y 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. :-(

jakozaur 14y ago

Good concept, but prefer one of their competitors: https://browserling.com/ https://browserling.com/ + Web based + No account needed to try it + Tunnels also available + Great blog from one of the founders catonmat.com

admc 14y ago
+ Our browser based testing service is also available at http://saucelabs.com 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 http://www.saucelabs.com/docs/connect Five minutes of research would have been helpful.
- jakozaur 14y 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.
  - admc 14y ago
    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.

JacksonGariety 14y ago

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

dools 14y ago
browserling.com browserstack.com
andybak 14y 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 14y 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.

hugs 14y ago
Yes, at the moment, it's iPhone and iPad simulators. However, offering testing on real devices, too, is a high priority for us.

ck2 14y 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/ https://browserling.com/ but it can be slow sometimes and has other issues.

sirn 14y 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 14y 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 https://dl.dropbox.com/u/132641/screenshots/sauce.png It also seems to be faster compare to browser based solutions.

marojejian 14y ago

Looks great!