« Pascal Bird (the avian, not his last name) | Main | Aeros Airships »
November 5, 2006
Shiira, Princess of Web Power
Shiira is a Web Kit based (same rendering engine Safari uses) browser for Mac OS X. The latest 1.2.2 release is much faster, lighter and includes more features than Safari.
I've been using it for about a week now and it's incredibly stable. CSS and secured sites load up fast and without any glitches. It's also more open than Safari in allowing you to customize the way it looks but it's default theme is aquatastic enough as is.
Which brings me to another point, why bother with another browser when you've got Safari and Firefox already? You already know my reasons why I chose Shiira over Safari, but here's why I chose it over Firefox.
The Mozilla group have done a wonderful job in making Firefox stable and extensible. Problem is, if you haven't noticed, Firefox runs much slower on a Mac and is prone to more memory leaks than it's brethren on the PC. That's because Firefox was compiled to be OS and processor independent thereby ignoring the advance framework the Mac has to offer. There are independent groups out there who have compiled their own versions of Firefox specifically for the Mac and they are a huge improvement. In fact, I have this one installed on my Mac. It works wonderfully but even so, it brings me to my last gripe with Firefox. It doesn't feel very Mac-like, no matter what theme you slap on it. It just doesn't dig into the advance technologies lying underneath the OS.
This is where Shiira shines. It's def. a Mac app thru and thru. It has all the features modern browsers do such as RSS support, page holders, private and offline browsing. It's Universal Access support for vision and hearing impaired people are by far the best. Another feature is the ability to view all your opened tabs via Expose style. Yes Firefox offers add-ons that give you the same ability but the feature is built into the core of Shiira taking advantage of OS X's core engine. This makes viewing 100 tabs in Expose quick and a breeze in Shiira where doing the same in Firefox would inundate you with a spinning wheel before completely crashing.
Just like Firefox, Shiira has nightly builds that anyone can participate in. It's quickly developing and already, the beta 2.0 version makes all other browsers look archaic. Tabs can be viewed as thumbnails in a dock-like interface similar to OmniWeb. You can view websites in kiosk mode which takes advantage of your screen real-estate by going fullscreen. All information such as bookmarks, browsing history, page holders, etc... are handled thru HUD panels similar to Apple's approach in application design where transparent controls appear when needed. The new Shelf feature makes organizing bookmarks super easy and no longer will you have to import bookmarks. It automatically reads them from other browsers installed on your machine so if you bookmark something in Firefox, it dynamically appears in Shiira. The interface has improved further and will look right at home in Apple's next version of OS X.
I personally can't wait for Shiira 2.0 and when it does come out, you can be sure there will be an updated post on it's expanded feature set and performance.
Download the current Universal release of Shiira here
full screenshot after the jump
Posted by tranism at 5:16 PM | Permalink
|
|
|
