
Launch any browser/OS right from your desktop with Sauce for Mac - awilson820
http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/12/introducing-sauce-for-mac-the-easiest-way-to-launch-any-browser-right-from-your-mac/
======
beatpanda
-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
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.

~~~
Cushman
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.

~~~
BryanB55
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.

~~~
talmand
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.

~~~
Cushman
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.

~~~
talmand
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.

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kyrra
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
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.

~~~
awilson820
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.

~~~
joshstrange
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.

------
jakozaur
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

~~~
admc
\+ 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.

~~~
jakozaur
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
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.

------
ek
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...](http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/08/apple-sauce-android-sauce/)).

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
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. :-(

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aytekin
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.

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ck2
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.

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netfire
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.

------
samuel02
Does anyone have experience with this? It would be interesting if this is
finally a good solution that really works.

~~~
kevingadd
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
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.

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sirn
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.

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

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

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suyash
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.

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ommunist
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
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.

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

~~~
leeloo
much faster for me.

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

~~~
gyardley
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.

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

~~~
andybak
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.

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

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

------
marojejian
Looks great!

------
azio
Just tried it and it worked really well.

