A lot of folks are asking, “what’s the difference between Fluid, Fluidium, and Cruz“? Here goes:

• Fluid is a 2-year-old application for creating Site-Specific Browsers (or SSBs). It consists of Fluid.app (the SSB creator) and a WebKit-based browser which is the template for any SSB you create with Fluid. Until recently, Fluid was entirely closed-source (more on that in a sec).
• Cruz is a one-year-old general-purpose web browser based the same code as Fluid SSBs. Until recently, it was also entirely closed source.
• Fluidium is:
  1. An open source (Apache License) WebKit-based browser hosted oh GitHub.
  2. The name I’ve chosen for an Adobe Air-like product based on the Fluidium source code. Basically, a developer platform for creating Rich Internet Applications for Mac OS X only. This product is in the very early stages.

If you are a developer, and you want to create and redistribute an SSB for your web app, please start with the Fluidium source code on GitHub, not with Fluid downloaded from http://fluidapp.com. It’s the same, only better. Trust me.

The Fluidium source code on GitHub is basically the original code behind Fluid SSBs and Cruz. However, I did a significant rewrite of several parts of that code base starting in November. The result is the Fluidium source code now found on GitHub.

A few things to note:

1. I haven’t yet released a new version of Fluid based on the new Fluidium source code. I’ll do that eventually. But first, I’ll probably do a much smaller Fluid maintenance release based on the old (pre-November) Fluid code, just to get some important bug fixes out the door.
2. A new version of Cruz based on the Fluidium source code is coming soon.
3. The “SSB Creator” part of Fluid (basically, Fluid.app) is still closed-source and will probably remain that way. I don’t see much value in open sourcing this, honestly.

Bottom line: The Fluidium source code on GitHub will be the foundation of three products (Fluid, Cruz, Fluidium).

Clear as mud, right?

Fluidium is just getting off the ground, and more info is coming soon . For now you can checkout the source code.