Shiira (シイラ, Japanese for the common dolphin-fish) is an open source web browser for the Mac OS X operating system. According to its website, the goal of Shiira is "to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari". Its Japanese designers crafted Shiira to use WebKit for rendering and scripting. The project is led by Makoto Kinoshita.
 | |
 Shiira (シイラ) 2.2 under Mac OS X 10.5.6 | |
| Developer(s) | Happy Macintosh Developing Time |
|---|---|
| Initial release | April 11, 2004 (Version 0.9) |
| Preview release | none (n/a) [±] |
| Written in | Objective-C Cocoa |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Available in | Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese |
| Type | Web browser |
| License | BSD license |
| Website | Template:Ja icon shiira.jp Template:En icon shiira.jp/en |
The last release of Shiira was in July, 2007 (version 2.2), and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. The final release for OS X 10.3 was 1.2.2. As of May 2009 the Shiira Project's website was no longer accessible, and the future development of the Shiira Browser is uncertain.
Features and performance
Since the browser is being developed with Safari in mind, the main characteristics of the two browsers are similar. For example, Shiira employs private browsing options so that history and cookies are not recorded when activated. However, Shiira has enhanced many features of Safari to give Shiira its own feel. The search engines search field on the toolbar includes many search engines and is fully customizable, and tabbed browsing is very flexible, enabling users to, for example, reorder tabs by dragging, or select an option to refresh tabs when they are clicked. Shiira also takes advantage of Cocoa programming to provide users with a customizable drawer extending from the left or right of the window. The drawer contains bookmarks (which launch based on a user-programmed preference of one or two clicks), history, downloads (to avoid cluttering the screen with additional download windows), a unique page holder to access myriad links while surfing other sites, and an RSS reader. In version 2.0 , the sidebar was replaced by a series of palletes opened and closed from the main window toolbar. Shiira natively supports in-browser PDF viewing.
Style
Among the appealing features of Shiira are abundant appearance options. Users may opt to switch between Aqua or Metal styles in addition to changing the button's appearances. However, in the current 2.0 release, changes in themes are, as yet, not available. Tabs are customizable both in appearance and in the choice of which tab comes to the fore of the screen after closing a tab. Add-on icon sets come packaged with the initial download. Another visually attractive option is "Tab Exposé", which acts much like the Exposé feature of Mac OS X; each tab is visible in its totality, enabling users to select the tab to which they wish to navigate with ease. The 1.x releases of Shiira also have a page-turning effect for transitions between any two webpages, however this was dropped from 2.x releases. The new interface in Shiira 2.0 can be set to display tabs as thumbnails along the bottom or sides of the window.