Shiira: Safari on Steroids?
Category: Apple/Mac OS...
Posted Friday, January 20, 2006 at 09:26 AM [GMT-6]

Shiira is a relatively new open-source browser for Mac OS X under development by a Japanese project team. The team's goals are lofty:

Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available.

The browser has some intriguing features including a tabbed sidebar (at what point do we become "over-tabbed," I wonder?) and a "tab Exposé" feature that allows you to view simultaneous thumbnails of all tabbed pages similar to the window-viewing capability of OS X's Exposé (at what point will Apple's legal department squash the reference to Exposé in this project?). Shiira also takes advantage of the enhanced graphics capabilities of Tiger's Core Image, incorporating it into a "page transition" effect that allows you move between windows with an actual page turning effect. It's undeniably cool, although its practical application is iffy.

I'm going to download and install the browser, even though I'm not running Tiger, just to see how it stacks up to Firefox (I never use Safari). If you're a Mac user and have installed Tiger, Shiira looks to be worth checking out.

Tip of the hat to William over at the elegantly designed and executed seaSons.

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(at what point will Apple's legal department squash the reference to Exposé in this project?)

Probably as soon as Konfabulator's legal department gets through quashing Dashboard. ;-)

Posted by: bryan at January 20, 2006 06:46 PM

Downloaded it and I like a few of the features. However it does not fix Safari's biggest problem, the inability to display the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress 2.0.

Posted by: Christopher at January 20, 2006 06:55 PM

Bryan, you're supposed to be nose-to-the-grindstone! What are you doing lurking around here? (I know; you're subtly hinting that I should be posting over at your place. ;-)

Christopher, do you suppose that's a WebKit issue? Well, it almost has to be, although I don't know enough about WebKit to guess what the specific incompatibility could be. (Oh, who am I kidding; I don't know anything about WebKit.)

Posted by: Eric at January 21, 2006 11:04 AM
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