SillyDog701

[Antony]

Shiira is a web browser from Happy Macintosh Developing Time (from Japan), written in Cocoa. It uses the KHTML rendering engine provided by Apple's Web Kit. The HTML content rendered by Shiira will look the same as in Apple's own browser.

(According to Shiira home) The first Shiira milestone is to implement the features used in everyday web browsing. The following has been implemented in the current version:
• Tabbed windows
• Bookmark management
• Sharing bookmarks with Safari
• Side drawer showing bookmarks and history
• Bookmarks toolbar
• Search field with choice of search engine
• Customizing toolbar
• Cache control panel

Shirra is available from
Shiira home (English)
Shiira home (Japanese)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) Shiira/0.9.1.1

[Don_HH2K]

Is this going to be the new Safari?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

[Antony]

Unlikely, but since it's based on the same Apple Web Kit, it will try to provide additional features.

It's good to have an alternative choice.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1

[Don_HH2K]

So there are going to be two Apple browsers now: Safari and Shiira?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; m18) Gecko/20000929 Netscape6/6.0b3

[Andrew T.]

So there are going to be two Apple browsers now: Safari and Shiira?

Shiira is not being developed by Apple Computer; it simply uses the same KHTML/Apple Web Kit rendering engine used by Apple's own Safari browser.

Safari and Shiira certainly aren't the only choices of web browser available to Mac OS X users; for example, many Gecko-based browsers (Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Camino), Opera, and a discontinued version of Internet Explorer have also been ported to the operating system, to name a few.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514

[Antony]

So there are going to be two Apple browsers now: Safari and Shiira?

Besides what Andrew said,
there's another one called TrailBlazer, using the same rendering engine as used by Apple's Safari.

TrailBlazer focused on something completely different, help you find the document you've visited.
See TrailBlazer thread, I reported a while back.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1

[Don_HH2K]

So you mean that Shiira isn't made by Apple?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

[Andrew T.]

So you mean that Shiira isn't made by Apple?

That is correct; the Shiira Project is not, nor is it directly affiliated with, Apple Computer.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514

[DJGM]

No, Shiira is not an Apple product.

Essentially, since Safari became the default web browser on Mac OS X, replacing IE5
for Mac, a number of other web browsers have started to appear, based upon the
same HTML rendering engine, called Apple WebKit, which in turn, is based
on the rendering engine found in KDE's Konqueror web browser.

The other 3rd party browsers for Mac OS X built upon the Apple WebKit rendering
engine I'm currently aware of are - OmniWeb 5.0 - TrailBlazer - and now Shiira.

I think what might happen eventually, is that these browsers will probably just use
the copy of the Apple WebKit rendering engine included with whichever version
of the Safari browser is installed on the computer, in much the same way that
some browsers made for Windows, tend to rely on the Trident rendering
engine from whichever version of IE is currently installed.

These types of browsers are often referred to as "wraparounds" or "shells". Although
the aformentioned Apple WebKIt based browsers each currently bundle their own
copy of the rendering engine, they could eventually become "wraparounds" or
"shells" relying on a copy of Safari to be already installed on the computer.

If anything, they would most likely do this mainly to keep their own download
filesizes to a minimum, and also assume all users of Mac OS X have a current
(or recent) version of Safari installed, in pretty much the same way that the
makers of Avant Browser, and MyIE2 (amongst others) rely on Windows
users having a current (or recent version) of IE already installed.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

[DJGM]

I'm trying Shiira 0.9.2 now, and IMO, for an Apple WebKit based browser it's not bad at all.
The download size weighs in at under 3MB, and the size of the actual executable package
file that runs the browser program itself, also comes to just under 3MB.

Which makes it smaller than Safari, and smaller than Opera. Although I won't be using it
as my main browser on my iMac, as my favourite rendering engine is Gecko, it has won
a place in my Applications folder, rather than just being launched from the disk image
file. Shiira has a customisable toolbars feature just like the one found in Camino,
which in turn, is comparably similar to the feature in Firefox.

IMO, Apple's own Safari browser really needs a customisable toolbars feature like
this, rather than just a bunch of checkmark options in the View menu, In fact,
it's possible that Shiira could well end up displacing Safari as the non-Gecko
browser of choice on my iMac. (Mozilla is still my main default browser.)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) Shiira/0.9.2

[Antony]

Thanks to the usage of Apple WebKit, new Shiiak is now available for new version of Mac OS X.

Shiiak 1.0 is now available for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

Users of Mac OS X 10.3.9 "Panther" can still use Shiiak 0.9.5

Users of Mac OS X 10.3.8 "Panther" can still use Shiiak 0.9.4

For more information, please see Shiiak Project from HMDT (Happy Macintosh Developing Time).

The "tabexpose" is the feature of Shiira, a very good way to manage tabs. All tabs displayed on the screen just like the Exposé introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther".

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) Shiira/1.0

[EddiePaxil]

I've tried a lot of these other browsers for OSX. I'm not exactly moved by any of them. Safari is the one I come back to time and time again. It seems to me that it's the only weak link to being a Mac user the browsers available are all a little latent. Safari being the least guilty of this.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/312