
Like Safari (and every other browser worth it’s salt out there), Shiira employs tabbed browsing, perhaps one of the coolest developments in the browser world ever. Doing a side-by-side comparison of the two with the Activity Monitor reveals that Shiira does, in fact, use slightly fewer system resources than Safari. For starters, it feels quite a bit quicker, especially when doing simple tasks like browsing the history. However, there are certain areas in which Shiira actually improves upon Safari. And since it’s fully Aqua-ized (unlike, say, Firefox, whose form widgets have a distinctly non-Mac look to them), it’s as pretty as any fully-fledged Mac app. But that shouldn’t be too surprising, seeing as how they both use Web Kit, Apple’s suite of tools for displaying web content. Perhaps too similar, based on some of the comments I’ve seen in discussion forums. The second thing you’ll notice, once you’ve installed Shiira, is that it’s very similar to Safari in terms of look and feel. (Note: Shiira is only available for OS X 10.3 Panther or higher.) In this day and age of bloatware, that’s a very encouraging sign.
#SHIIRA WEB BROWSER DOWNLOAD#
The first thing you’ll notice when you download Shiira is that the DMG file is under 2MB in size. Although Shiira is still in beta and has a few interface bugs and inconsistencies, it’s incredibly well-formed and has a great deal of promise.

I’ve been using the latest version (as of this writing), 0.9.3, as my primary browser at home for the past week or so, and have been very impressed. Safari - Apple’s own browser, and my personal fave.Īnd now you can add one more to the list: the Japanese browser Shiira.OmniWeb - A Mac-only browser with a pretty dedicated following.Opera - One of the first alternative browsers.Camino - A Mac-optimized browser built using Mozilla’s codebase.Firefox - The open source, Mozilla-based browser currently getting so much press, thanks to IE’s security failings.Mozilla - Netscape’s open source browser suite.Internet Explorer - Which is no longer being developed by Microsoft.

games), you can’t say that Mac users don’t have enough options when it comes to web browsers.Īs of right now, there are several competent web browsers for the Mac:

And while that’s still somewhat true today in certain areas (i.e.
#SHIIRA WEB BROWSER SOFTWARE#
This review is here primarily for archival purposes.īack in the day, one of the common criticisms levelled at the Mac was that its software library was incredibly limited - especially when compared to the gigantic library that existed for the Windows platform.
