New Mac Browser: Shiira Project

Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Saturday, June 9. 2007

New Mac Browser: Shiira Project

While I was playing around with Camino (which ended up being disappointing), I came across another browser: Shiira Project, which is written in Cocoa.
One of the niceties that I noticed already is that this browser seems to have a nicer font scaling mechanism when compared against Firefox, making smaller fonts easier to read. Of course, Yahoo! Mail Beta doesn't support it yet. ;-) However, the Search function on the Perl CD Bookshelf does work correctly under the latest version of this browser. I am still playing around with this one, but it looks promising so far. Another thing that I noticed is that downloaded items keep the original modification date/time stamp rather then getting the date/time stamp of when they were downloaded.
There are still some rough edges in the latest version (2.0 Build: 070510); there is no way to reorder tabs, the browser crashes on occasion, and bookmarks management is pretty poor (i.e. there is no way to rename already saved bookmarks). Below is the summarization of the good points and bad points of the newly discovered browser.

The good points:

  • Seems to have better performance
  • Nice Skins
  • Perl CD Bookshelf works correctly
  • Nice tabs/preview window(s) bottom of browser
  • Nicer font rendering/scaling
  • Handy popup Download and History windows
  • (Minor point) Editing in my Serendipity Blog Theme works correctly


    • The bad points (rough edges ;-) ):

  • No way to reorder tabs
  • No easy way to rename already saved bookmarks
  • Crashes at times
  • Browser not supported by some sites (i.e. Yahoo! Beta Mail)
  • Not all of the Firefox extras (i.e. keyword searces, extensions {especially the del.icio.us one}, etc)
    • Incidently, a nice site to retrieve extras from is PimpMyShiira.
    Posted by Colleen Velo in Computers, Firefox, Mac Comments: (2) Trackbacks: (0)

    Comments
    Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

    #1 - David said:
    2007-08-20 04:00 - (Reply)

    Thanks for the mention - just noticed that the official Shiira forum had gone down - hope this isn't a repeat of the demise of the previous forum :-(

    #1.1 - C Velo said:
    2007-08-20 07:28 - (Reply)

    No problem. I wasn't aware that the forums site was down. :-(
    (I do know that I haven't seen any project updates since July 25th). I'll keep my fingers crossed that the developers are on a holiday and the forums site experienced a glitch during that time. ;-)


    Add Comment

    Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
    Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

    To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
    CAPTCHA 1CAPTCHA 2CAPTCHA 3CAPTCHA 4CAPTCHA 5
     
    Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.