Shiira 1.0 review

Browsers, browsers, browsers - Mac users are tripping over the things these days, so new offerings have to distinguish themselves. The Japanese Shiira 1.0 browser does just that.

Shiira is based, like Safari, on Apple's WebKit, rather than the supposedly faster Gecko engine in Camino and FireFox. Shiira 1.0 presents a very Safari-like aspect, but go to Bookmarks and you will notice the first difference: bookmarks are displayed in a slide-out tray rather than taking over the whole screen. History and Downloads are also confined to the tray, so you do not have to hunt around for the downloads pane. This attention to user interface is apparent everywhere in Shiira: hitting '.' on the numeric keypad cycles through open tabs, which is useful, as Shiira does not truncate tabs as they fill up the browser window, displaying instead the '>>' icon to access non-visible tabs. However, if you press F8, all the open tabs are displayed as Expose windows. This is just too cute.

There are other nice touches: a '+' button in the Tab bar for a new tab, double-clicking a tab reloads the page, a wide choice of search engines from Google and the ability to swap between Safari and Shiira's bookmarks.

However, for all this interface loveliness, there are some drawbacks. Bookmark folders accessed from the Bookmarks bar by the '>>' button lose their 'Open in Tabs' field and, worse, while you can re-order bookmarks in the side tray, you cannot drag them into folders.

At the moment, there does not seem to be any way to automatically open downloaded files, but Shiira will organise your downloads into dated folders, which keep things tidy. These folders are also displayed in the side tray, and you can search your Download History, but there is no option to take you to the file in the Finder. Furthermore, pop-up blocking is not automatically enabled, although you can implement it as a Cascading Style Sheet in Advanced preferences. One serious omission is the lack of forms autofill, and we hope that this is addressed soon.

Page rendering was fast - certainly up there with FireFox, and Flash and Java gave us no problems. Considering it started off as a personal experiment with WebKit, Shiira is shaping up into a very polished product, and we are looking forward to its next release.

Author: Tim Danaher