Obvious Diversion

What Is It?

Shiira is a web browser based on Apple’s webkit aka the rendering engine behind Safari and is meant to compete with Safari on features Safari doesn’t currently offer.

Some genuinely interesting features include:

• Tab Expose (originally seen in, well, Apple’s Expose but also available as a Firefox plugin called Foxspose)
• Open All Links in Tabs

Some serious deficits include:

• A sliding drawer. I can’t stand these things and they need to disappear as a UI element from the Mac OS altogether as they have from the most recent version of Mail.
• I don’t find it’s RSS implementation appealing at all. That said, I don’t like Safari’s either.
• They’re still implementing features we’ve come to expect in the base-level feature set such as auto-fill for passwords.

Here’s a series of Shiira screenshots so you can see it for yourself sans install.

Should you use Shiira?

Honestly, I have to say no. What’s the point here? The Mac already has two great browsers with healthy development teams behind them: Safari and Firefox. A better path would be to have the Shiira project be an enhancement plug-in for Safari or a plug-in for Firefox. As a whole separate browser, I don’t see Shiira gathering the user-base or larger development momentum it needs to survive in the long term. I’d love to see a couple of Shiira’s features make it into my browser of choice, Safari, but I’m not willing to give up my whole browser to get them.