The Hickensian
38 comments
Shiira
As if I didn’t already have enough choice in OS X browsers, along comes another. Shiira is an open source browser, built using Safari’s webkit, that the Japanese developers intend to be “a browser that is better and more useful than Safari”. As it uses the latest verson of webkit, it will only run on 10.3.
The interface, at first glance, looks a lot like Safari. The tabs implementation are almost identical (although tab labels aren’t bold), and the preferences window layout shares many similarities. However, unlike Safari’s interface, Shiira uses a fully customisable Aqua toolbar and bookmarks/history are displayed in a sidebar drawer instead of replacing the window, just like Camino 0.7. Most importantly, it doesn’t have Safari’s elegance or good looks in the toolbar icon department. Take a look at this screenshot and the various icon options being offered. The Jade stone set is the default.
Elements like the icons on the toolbar folders are unnecessary, but like all these things, can be themed however you like! So, to make it more pleasant to use, I’ve thrown together bits from my Camino and Omniweb themes and made a temporary one for Shiira:
If you’d like to try this theme too, download it here (if your browser doesn’t understand .sitx files, you may have to control-click the link and choose ‘save file as..’). All you have to do is go to Shiira’s icon preferences, choose ‘load icons’, and navigate to the ‘ShiiraIcons.plist’ inside the Hickstheme folder. This will load the main toolbar icons. If you want a plain folder icon, these have to copied manually into > Shiira (ctrl-click to choose ‘show package contents’)> contents> resources>. I haven’t redone all the icons, but the main ones are there
There are several advantages in using Shiira:
- Re-orderable Tabs. This is my main reason for feeling excited by Shiira. I use this a lot in Ominweb, and I’m looking forward to when Camino gets the function (soon).
- New Tab button situated to the right of the tabs is quite handy.
- Its fast. Runs faster than Safari for me, and it’s level-pegging with the latest Camino builds for speed. It seems to use the least amount of CPU of all my browsers.
- Customisable search bar, out of the box.
- Option is given to switch between metal or aqua appearance.
- Pace of development seems quite fast.
It shows great promise, even though the interface might not quite be there yet. On one hand it feels a little basic, but then throws in some great features like the drag and drop re-orderable tabs. Another one to keep my eye on…
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marc said 1861 days ago:
Yes, it does look promising, and the roadmap has a couple of good basic additions, and nice items:Alex said 1861 days ago:
I really like Shiira and the interface quirks are not bad.
marc said 1861 days ago:
Alex, thanks for pointing out the click-hold menu, I hadn't noticed, that.Jon, thanks for the button set - originally I'd been using one of the Safari sets, but now I'm using the new Camino icons, which are really nice.
Alex said 1861 days ago:
Heh, after using FF for a long time click-hold became one of my favorite features that I really miss when using Safari ... Shiira "fixed" that.Alex said 1861 days ago:
Ok, I just made it my default browser ;) One problem is that tabbing through elements/forms does not work :(Kevin said 1861 days ago:
Well, i hope they could port it to windows, just to get some Safari lovin' here! :Dak said 1861 days ago:
it won't happen kevin, not unless apple ports safari to windows. they're running shiira off of safari's coreCristiano said 1861 days ago:
I don't know if iTunes for Windows uses a port of the WebKit engine. If so, i think is possible to build a Web Browser using that WebKit.Phil said 1861 days ago:
iTunes doesn't use WebKit...Sean Devine said 1861 days ago:
Jon - I'm very glad that you are obsessing over OS X browsers. Your blog is the best source for the kind of info that I'm most interested in. I just hope that the OmniGroup releases a faster, more stable version of OmniWeb soon. I really like the feature set that they've pulled together.Off to download Shiira!
Hans Hyttinen said 1861 days ago:
Jon, you're the top candidate for Person to Convince Me to Buy a Mac. The Shiira interface looks so sleek, slim, lean, and beautiful... I'll go dream on some more...marc said 1861 days ago:
As Jon said, on his last post, Shiiri's drag-and-drop tabs are very handy.Not only can you reorder them, but with the tab bar always visible (which I'd not done in Safari) I'm finding it rather useful to be able to drag URLs to the tab bar to load pages. Of course, you can do this in Safari as well.
Just to state the obvious, dragging works within the app, and from others; so it's quite handy to grab a URL, Expose, pause on the desired window, and then drop on the tab bar.
One thing that I do miss is Spell Check.
Jon Hicks said 1860 days ago:
The one other thing that Shiira's tabs have over Safari is that there is always space for dragging a url to create a new tab. In Safari, you get to certain limit, and you're stuck with replacing the url for one of the tabs. With Shiira, you can always have the option for a new tab.One big annoyance - you can't specify for links from other apps to open as tabs. For this reason I can't use it as a default, as opening feeds from NetNewsWire would end up in a sea of windows.
Richard Earney said 1859 days ago:
Mmmmm.This is great - esp the Sidebar!!!! Much more sensible!
jake said 1859 days ago:
I tried to go there (can't download anyway till tonight) but the page was not available. So I did a search and you can at least download it from MacUpdate (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15032)Josh B. said 1859 days ago:
Hey, How about some love for whoever told you about this browser?Lol. It does look promising though, It is so exciting to see just how many browsers are coming out for OS X lately.... choices are always good!
Jeff Clark said 1859 days ago:
I swear I'm about the only person not using a Mac that visits this site!What I wouldn't give to be able to use Safari and this new Shiira browser on a daily basis... oh well, at least I have FireFox.
Celina said 1859 days ago:
Its real snappy but I'm not finding the keyboard shortcuts for navigating from tab to tab. Am I missing something obvious here?If I could find those, this could very well be my new default browser.
marc said 1859 days ago:
Celina,To switch tabs, use Cmd-{ and } (or more accurately Cmd-Shift-[ and ]
BTW gawd I hate the way Cocoa apps mislabel their command keys, no, just because you have to use the Shift key to get the {} characters, doesn't mean you can leave shift out of the menu, bad Apple!
Unfortunately the tab switching doesn't cycle, so you have to go forward ( Cmd-} ), and back ( Cmd-{ )
cheers
Jon Hicks said 1859 days ago:
Jeff - according to my site stats, Mac users are still in the minority on this blog. The split is:Windows - 59%
Macintosh - 23%
Indeterminable - 12%*
Linux - 6%
*whatever that is!!
hetima said 1858 days ago:
Thank you for review Shiira. I'm member of Shiira project.Shiira has hidden shortcut to switch tabs.
Just type "," and "."
Jon Hicks said 1858 days ago:
Hetima - thanks for stopping by. I've been using Shiira almost exclusively for a week now. Despite a few missing features, its a joy to use.Thanks for the keyboard shortcuts - great stuff!
Seth Messer said 1856 days ago:
Jon,Thanks for this suggestion on a Safari replacement, I remember reading about another Safari replacement spelled much the same as Safari, but I can't think of it off the top of my head.
Anyway, I just recently got a new 12" powerbook, and previously had a g4 a year ago (sold it for undisclosed reasons). Anyway, I remembered Safari being pretty weak in terms of compatibility to standards. THere were some high points and some low points, but what the heck, out of no where, I'm using the latest version of Safari more than Firefox as my default browser? I thought i'd never give up my allegiance to the Mozilla group but I think Apple has "switched" me again.
As I've stated before, and as Andrei (DxF) stated, you're site makes me feel all giddy when I visit it. It's so refreshing, out of the box and just a joy to read. Thanks for the inspiration. You make green cool for websites. :D
Alex said 1855 days ago:
The latest nightly is absolutely great. A lot of improvements, fixes and even new features. Highly recommended.Jon Hicks said 1855 days ago:
Thanks for the heads up Alex - this is fantastic. It fixes one of my main problems with Shiira - links from apps opening in a new window rather than a new tab. I can't believe the pace of development.Alex said 1855 days ago:
Unfortunately, open in new tab (single window mode) does not work for all applications ... works for Mail.app and Adium, but doesn't work with NetNewsWire. It could be just me.I really like what they've done with the sidebar. Anyways, I'm loving it™ ;)
brian w said 1855 days ago:
"if your browser doesn’t understand .sitx files, you may have to control-click the link and choose ‘save file as..’" -- I thought this was something that could be fixed on the server through MIME types.Aias said 1854 days ago:
apparently no brian. i have tried using my 5 browsers and none of them can just straight download the sitx file, and i have the latest stuffit! jon's suggestion to ' save file as ' does work though. i am loving the re-orderable tabs and now that i experience the tab drawer once again i can see why the issue wont die in the Camino forums :)jon hicks said 1853 days ago:
Josh - sorry, much love to you for tipping me off!Alex - I'm not getting that problem. It could be worth downloading the latest nightly, as there have been some bugfixes to that area.
If they could add bookmarklet support (I use this a LOT), keychain access and autofill it'd be my default browser in a flash. I'd also like things like session saving, bookmark separators, save tab group etc. - but I'd settle for the first 3!
marc said 1853 days ago:
Jon, I'm sure you know that they plan most of what you mention (according to their site.)I'd agree on all of those, and pretty much the order (except save tab group before separators!)
I'd also add Spell Check, tho that's a pretty obvious one.
Maybe it's just a detail, but I'd prefer the drawer to be a sidebar, like the Finder, as you've pointed to... that's not to criticise the drawer, they've done it well; the window isn't 'destructively' changed, and on larger screens, it's fine.
I'm really not sure that it's worth arguing over, both a sidebar, and drawer basically achieve the same thing... there's just a different feel... when you compare Firefox to Shiira, perhaps Shiira feels more OS X by having a drawer...?
The Nisus Writer drawer could be a good model, with it's collapsable sections, for additional features; I'm not sure that the horizontal tabs work so well with a variable width element, like a drawer.
I wonder how they'll handle the RSS reader?
BTW - anyone think it's worth moving, or adding discussion to the SourceForge page?
Alex said 1853 days ago:
Jon: I don't use bookmarklets, but keychain and autofill are a must.Tab Browser Extensions for Shiira ... thats a good idea ;)
marc: Shiira has a spell checker. It's activated just like in Safari; right/ctrl-click a text area > Spelling > Check spelling as you type.
Jon Hicks said 1853 days ago:
I agree Marc, I think a finder-type sidebar would be better. I think Firefox gets this so right - the way the sidebar comes in an out without having to move the window to do it (this is why I have the drawer open all the time). I also think they look less 'stuck on'.The problem with taking the discussion to SourceForge is that once you've logged in, its all in Japanese! Unless anyone can see where to change this? Maybe we should just start a 'western' forum?
marc said 1853 days ago:
Alex, re Spell Check, thanks for that, I hadn't looked there (obviously!) Just to nit pick a little, it isn't activated 'just like Safari', I was looking for the writing features in the Edit menu; by convention at least Spelling and Speech should appear underneath Find, and since they support it, Writing Direction too.Anyhow, I'm very happy to see that the support is there. : )
Jon, I wasn't sure if I was being too picky re drawer vs. sidebar, but as you say, it becomes more of any issue in different scenarios; for me on my dual head desktop, the drawer is fine, and I too leave it open (and agree that it feels a bit tacked on!) On my laptop, with small screen, the drawer is always hidden, but still, showing a sidebar, or a drawer, will still just end up cutting into the available window space...
I think sidebars just tend to feel 'neater', and more integrated into the window, witness comparing Acquisition, to acqlite... and how would iTunes feel if the source list were a drawer...? I haven't looked at the shifting sands of the UI definitions, to determine the thinking behind the different conventions, or if it's more 'flavour of the month' type design...?
I think that a sidebar works more clearly when the contents of the sidebar is used to effect the contents of the main window (Finder, Firefox, acqlite, skEdit), it's really just a evolution of a paned UI anyway, and this would work well for their RSS reader. All of this despite the fact that this is also what drawers are used for (Mail, Aquisition etc.)
There just aren't clear conventions.
I wonder just how much of it, for Apple, comes down to drawers being a bit different to what everyone else is doing, vs being accused of copying other OS conventions...?
Re SourceForge, yeah, I discovered that too! Oh well, I guess the developer's have seen this discussion. : )
Aias said 1853 days ago:
Shiira Shocker!i was buying my airline ticket online, went to print my electronic ticket and... umm, printing is not happening in Shiira. See what happens when one takes things for granted?
marc said 1852 days ago:
Aias, yeah that's the type of reason why I've held off switching full-time; they list printing as a coming feature.I guess you could take a screen shot... but you probably don't have the site open anymore..?
Bo said 1852 days ago:
Great blog, Jon; well done! Like you and others here, I like Shiira a lot. However, I can't seem to print Web pages with Command-P. I have no problems with printing in Safari, Mozilla, etc. Has anyone else here experienced this? Is there a hotkey command I'm missing? Thanks.Bo said 1852 days ago:
Ooops... I posted my note before I noticed the "Shiira Shocker" comment above. So I'm not alone, then :)Bo said 1852 days ago:
"Maybe we should just start a ‘western’ forum?"Looks like we already have, Jon ;)
Cheers!