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Tuesday, July 19, 2005
OS X Odyssey 634 - Shiira 1.1 Web Browser Mini-ReviewRelated categories • Blogs • OSX Odyssey • Reviews • Internet Reviews
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When the Cocoa-based Shiira web browser arrived on the scene in 2003, 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 least-appealing current OS X browser, but uninspiring.
However, and Firefox improved and with the intorduction of Opera 8, I drifted away from Shiira for a time. The last version of Shiira that I really used a lot was 0.9.3, so with the release of version 1.1, I figured it was time to check in on how this browser is coming along. I'm glad I did.
The first thing I noted was that the little fish icons (Shiira is the Japanese word for dolphin fish -- not the mammal 'dolphin' -- or dorado, also known as 'mahi mahi' in Hawaiian) are gone, replaced by generic Apple Cocoa theme icons, which make Shiira look very similar to Camino. However, if you liked the fish, don't despair you can get them back, or select from a variety of other icon themes in the preferences. Whatever,the browser has a refreshingly clean, uncluttered look.
The second thing I noticed is that Shiira 1.1 is very fast, definitely in the same league as Firefox, Camino, and Opera, and perhaps even surpassing them.
Shiira still has one of the best and most useful implementations of the Cocoa drawer I've encountered in any browser. The drawer can display Bookmarks, a Download Manager, or browsing History at the click of a tab. A thoughtful detail touch typical of Shiira is that you can specify whether the book mark items in the drawer will respond to a single or double click.
Shiira was always rock-stable, and evidently remains so. No unexpected quits. No flaky behavior.
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 Tex Edit Plus or DEVONthink with a menu selection. Very cool. Shiira imported my Safari and Firefox 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 display either Safari or Firefox bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu.
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
In summary, I'm freshly reminded of while I was so enthusiastic about she ran when it came out, and this version 1.1 is even more attractive. I think I'm going to stick with it for while in place of Firefox.
Icing on the proverbial cake is that Shiira is very small - the compressed file for downloading is only 2.4 MB, which makes checking it out relatively painless even for we dial-up peasants.
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.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3.9
Shiira is freeware
For more information, visit:
http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/index-e.html
Charles W. Moore
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