I recently transitioned to Safari because I'm really tired of how Chrome hogs memory and drains my battery like crazy. The only thing that has been keeping the Chrome icon open is the Hangouts plugin. Basically, I am looking for the lightest way to run Hangouts on my Mac. By light, I mean the least amount of RAM usage, and preferably a way to do it without Chrome open/light version of Chrome that only opens extensions. Any suggestions?
EDIT: Another thing I noticed was that Hangouts ignores your default browser if links are sent to you by chat, and when clicked they open in Chrome. My question doesn't relate to this at all, but I found it interesting…
Best Answer
I think the Chrome hangouts plugin is very nice, and the solution from McGuire can be used to make a browser dedicated to hangouts. Alternatively we can also use Fluidapp, which "transform" Hangouts web application into a "dedicated" desktop application - which is stored like any other mac os application in the Applications folder. This seems to be a very light browser (from a quick inspection on the activity monitor).
Here are the instructions:
It is not like a native client (like Adium)... also it does not provide notifications as nice as the Hangouts chrome extension... but it provides a nice way to organize all the chat windows in more contained manner, and it is a light way to have Hangouts running.