Shiira is an open source browser for Mac OS X that is based off Web Kit and written in Cocoa so it runs at native speeds on a Mac. Shiira has been in development since 2004 so it has been in development for about 4 years. Because Shiira is based on Web Kit it uses the same rendering as Safari so when looking at web pages in Shiira and Safari they will look identical.
Shiira Mini is a slimmed down version of Shiira for the Dashboard which can come in useful if you’re wanting to do a little bit of searching when working on something without having to open an actual browser up.
Within settings for the widget you can choose the URL of the homepage you want for Shiira Mini, what bookmarks bar to use (Shiira, Safari) and the color of the widget.
Toolbar
On the Toolbar from right to left you have the back button, forward button, reload, stop, address bar, add bookmark, shelf, bookmarks, history, search, new tab/pagedock. Then below the toolbar is where the website will be displayed.
PageDock
Within Shiira you can choose whether to use the PageDock or a tab bar, by default when you first load Shiira up the PageDock the selected option to change this go to Preferences -> PageDock & Tab.
Below the PageDock is the Status Bar. On the Status Bar the first icon is for cookie information on the current website you’re viewing, next to that if the website has an RSS feed then this icon will appear and when you click it the feed will be displayed in the feed reader built within Shiira, when you click the arrow on the far right of the Status Bar it will toggle hiding and showing the PageDock, the four box icon is an Exposé like feature that will layout all the websites you have out so that its easy to browse a lot of websites and see what page you’re on.
The shelf in Shiira lets you view and manage all of your Shiira and Safari bookmarks as well as files that you have downloaded. Within the shelf you can also seen your Firefox bookmarks and your history. You can also modify the search engines that can be used in the search bar on the Toolbar. By default there is a few already configured search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Excite, Dictionary.com and more.
Full Screen
You can view websites in fullscreen so that the website covers your whole screen. Opera also has this feature.
Appearance
You can change the icons and theme of Shiira, there are only a few themes but at least its somewhat customizable. You can download Shiira themes from here
Page Info
Under page info you can view information on links, DOM, cookies, HTML, CSS, Javascript, the images on the page and other things such as flash files.
Language Support
Shiira Supports the following languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Korean, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish and Chinese.
Tell us what you think about Shiira and how you think it compares to other browsers such as Firefox and Opera.
(By) Wez is a student studying computers, also does programming and video tutorials and writes about technology, software and websites, check out his blog @ www.TheTutorialBlog.com
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Filed Under: Browser ¦ Mac
Tags: better alternatives, browsers, Mac, open source
Never heard about Shiira before… Any idea on how popular it is? Any estimates on how many people are using it? Just wondering.
I’m not sure how many people are using Shiira sorry, I like it though and I think it should be discovered by more people.
I used to use Shiira, although several versions ago.
It was nice enough, particularly for speed of start up and displaying a page, but quite buggy I found, which sent me back to Camino.