Shiira is the New Safari

How many browsers do you have? You'd think with Safari, Camino, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and others-- there won't be room for yet another browser? Think again.

Shiira is an up and coming browser for the Mac. What makes it different? good question. Right now, it is no different from Safari. as their website says:

Shiira is a web browser written in Cocoa. It uses the KHTML rendering engine provided by Apple's Web Kit. Since this is the same rendering engine used by Safari, HTML content rendered by Shiira will look the same as in Apple's own browser.

To be honest, i skipped their stable version (dmg download link) and went right ahead to get version 2 "preview" (dmg download link). Hey, what can I say--- living dangerously is fun!

Off the bat-- what's unique about shiira is its user interface. Kiosk mode is great. Bookmarking is also good, as its HUD panels a.k.a. disassembled sidebar. It has an rss reader, which i haven't figured out how to use. Downloading, it creates its own folder based on the date, which really makes my desktop neat without thinking about it and that alone is a plus factor. What has really caught on with me is the new way they present our good buddy "tab".

got this image of the user interface off Shiira's home page

The PageDock

The PageDock (click image above to enlarge) is really an interesting way to present the webpages of each tab. It gives you a preview of the site. Coming from camino, i've been so used to looking at tabs on right under the address bar that i've had to go look down. It took a few hours of using Shiira to get used to the idea of the tabs being below. But i tell you, after those initial hours, i've come to love this feature.

I'm currently writing this blog post using Shiira. For some reason, this thing is running blogger post in "edit html mode" and the compose mode tab isn't to be found, which opening on camino (my camino btw is a nightly build as well) shows no change in blogger. a minor annoyance, really but this is a preview version and these guys are still making it.

All things considered, Shiira works just as good as Safari and Camino.