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Wednesday, September 15, 2004
OS X Odyssey 634 - Shiira 0.9.3 Web Browser Gets A New InterfaceRelated categories • OSX Odyssey
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When the Cocoa-based Shiira web browser arrived on the scene last spring, it almost instantly became my favorite among browsers based on the KHTML rendering engine provided by Apple's Web Kit, which include Safari and OmniWeb. It was small, fast, and refreshingly unbuggy, but its interface was, well, kind of homely. Not worse than Safari, which as my vote for the ugliest current OS X browser, but uninspiring.
With the release of Shiira 0.9.3 this week, the little Japanese browser gets a new, more attractive interface, although I think developer Makoto Kinoshita is trying to get a little too much milage out of the new fish icon design (Shiira is the Japanese word for dolphin fish -- not the mammal 'dolphin' -- or dorado, also known as 'mahi mahi' in Hawaiian), but at least it's an attractive icon, and the browser has a refreshingly clean, uncluttered look.
The other major improvement in Shiira 0.9.3 is one of the best and most useful implementations of the Cocoa drawer I've encountered in a browser. The drawer can display Bookmarks, a Download Manager, or browsing History at the click on a tab.
And all the already good stuff is back. Shiira is fast. Very fast. Relatively speaking of course, since I have a slow dial - up connection, but it's in the same ballpark as FireFox, Opera 7.53, Safari 1.2.3, and Netscape 7.2,
It's still rock-stable. No unexpected quits. No flaky behavior. I wish I could say the same for most of the other current beta browser builds (and even some finals).
Shiira has all the key features I look for any browser. For instance, a very nice implementation of tabbed browsing, and being a native Cocoa application, it has full support of OS X Services, which means that I can export selected Web page content into ex Edit Plus orTDEVONthink with a menu selection. Very cool. Shiira imported my Safari bookmarks automatically on startup, and since it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, HTML content rendered by Shiira looks the same as in Apple's browser. The preferences allow you to integrate Safari bookmarks.
Shiira features
• Tabbed windows
• Bookmark management
• Sharing bookmarks with Safari
• Side drawer showing bookmarks and history
• Bookmarks toolbar
• Search field with choice of search engine
• Customizing toolbar
• Cache control panel
• Window appearance switching (Aqua and Metal)
• Toolbar icons switching
• Removing Cookie and cache at the termination
• Displaying favicon list
• Enable/disable favicon with bookmark
• Help document (Japanese only)
• Multiple source windows per one browser window
• Displaying HTTP header in source window
• Wheel button operation (open in new tab, and tab switching)
• Auto-tab for bookmark folder
• Displaying back-forward list on toolbar buttons
• Search text field for bookmark and history
New in this version:
• Implemented printing feature
• Integrated download features to the side bar
• Supported the browse mode feature which opens a link always in the same tab, always in a new tab, or always in a new background tab
• Improved drag and drop for a link and a bookmark
• The capacity of memory and disk cache are changeable
• Changed the application icon
• Improved stability
• Supported French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Simpified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch.
System requirements:
Shiira requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later, because this project is builds on the latest Apple Web Kit and Cocoa features.
Shiira's source code is released under the revised BSD license. This means you can use, modify, and redistribute this source code, if the copyright notice is retained. There are no restrictions for personal or commercial use. It is also not necessary to publish modifications made to the source code. See the document included in the downloaded image file for further information.
For more information, visit:
http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/index-e.html
***
Charles W. Moore
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Reader Comments
Posted by Kim on 09/15 at 01:00 PM
Charles,
One feature (besides Services) that I require of a browser is that it be able to use the “Shared Menu” feature of shareware URL Manager Pro. Safari, Opera, Omniweb, IE, and most others support “Shared Menu” and permits the user to park the bookmarks of any browser in a separate file “on-the-fly”, so that they are accessible later from any browser by using a menu bar thingy. No need to import/export ever. As browsers improve and people migrate to the latest and greatest, this is VERY useful.
I have yet to check out the new Shiira update that you refer to.The last time I tried Shiira, it did not support this and you make no mention of it in your review. It is something that the developer should look into.
Kim
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