Shiira – a New Browser for the Mac

[CaptainQuark]

The Independent today featured an article about a number of browsers. Among those listed was a Mac browser that I've never heard of before called Shiira. It's an open-source Japanese browser that seems to be trying to do to Safari what Mozilla did to Nutscrape… errrr sorry: Netscape.

Ever curious, I have downloaded it and tried it. I have to say that I was impressed! I am using it right now and have found it to be fast and stable thus far. Still, I'm no expert on these matters, so you can find out for yourselves, if you're interested.

You can download it here.

Of course, what I should have done, was to check whether or not anyone else had posted anything about it before. I just did that and discovered that this is old news!

D'oh!

[JetwingX]

yep, good efforts though

[bbloke]

I saw a review of this in a magazine, and it was quite highly rated. The developer's web site looks really nice and shows off some interesting features of Shiira. So, what sort of day-to-day features would you say give it an advantage over Safari? Does Shiira cope with a broader, narrower, or similar range of web sites (i.e. are there "incompatibilities")?

Of course, I may well download it for myself and try it out too!

[Mikuro]

As far as site compatibility goes, it should be exactly the same as Safari, since it uses the same engine (Apple's WebKit).

The advantage of Shiira is that it's a bit "beefier" than Safari. It has more preferences and some advanced features. It has an Exposé-like feature for displaying all the open tabs in a window that's pretty neat (albeit a little slow). One semi-useful feature Shiira has that I haven't noticed in any other browser is the ability to turn OFF text smoothing. Yes, sometimes I actually want to.

PithHelmet used to support Shiira as well as Safari, but it seems the current version (of one or the other; I'm not sure which) breaks compatibility. Bummer. If I didn't have to leave PithHelmet, I'd seriously consider moving to Shiira full-time.

All in all, it's not really all that different from Safari. There aren't many advantages, but then, there are even fewer disadvantages.

One cool thing about Shiira is that it uses the same source files as Safari for bookmarks and even cookies. So as soon as you load it, boom! everything is set up. Now messing around with bookmark conversions or re-entering passwords.

[CaptainQuark]

Originally Posted by bbloke

o, what sort of day-to-day features would you say give it an advantage over Safari? Does Shiira cope with a broader, narrower, or similar range of web sites (i.e. are there "incompatibilities")?

Corblimey! After 10 minutes of tinkering, I'm hardly in a position to give you a detailed technical analysis…! Thus far, I've established that the interface is cleaner and less cluttered and that it seems fast and smooth. Then I wnet home.

This morning, we have been without internet connection (Force9 has to be about the worst ISP in the UK), so I haven't had the time to investigate further!