Shiira: The Alt Webkit Browser

Shiira is a browser, that like Safari, is written in Cocoa and is based on the Web-Kit rendering engine. Unlike Safari, Shiira is an open source project. It’s aimed at “creating a browser that is better and more useful than Safari.” While the main characteristics of both are similar (Private Browsing, Search Bar, Tabbed Browsing, etc.), however, Shiira has enhanced many features of Safari, making it very much a browser of it’s own.

It’s interface is very customizable, from the ability to re-order tabs, to the it’s interchangeable search-engine bar. The browser is of comparable stability and speed to Safari, making it among the fastest and most functional browsers available for OS X.

Not only this, but Shiira’s GUI is customizable as well, there is option to switch between aqua and brushed metal styles. Shiira also features the very appealing “Tab Exposé”, which acts much like OS X’s own Exposé feature; rendering each open tab completely visible, simplifying web navigation. Shiira also has a page transition effect, which creates a page-turning look for navigation between any two webpages. Shiira’s 2.0 beta can even be set to display tabs as thumbnails along the bottom of the screen.

Even after outlining it’s many impressive features, there are of course many imperfections that go along with them. Shiira has no RSS support, but if you have saved an RSS feed as a bookmark in Safari and imported it into Shiira, it will open in Safari. Managing bookmarks can be an annoyance as well, as you can only delete bookmarks you have created in Shiira. You cannot delete imported bookmarks, nor can you import bookmarks from any browser aside from Firefox or Safari. Autofill is not yet implemented, and english documentation is quite poor. It sometimes renders accented characters into Japanese script, and suffers the many site compatibilty problems as Safari. Overall, Shiira is a decent and well implemented alternative browser, and is definitely worth a try.