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Shiira browser

I had noticed this project a while ago, but it was extremely rough and incomplete then, so I stuck it in my tickle file to look again in a few months.

Then this email arrived from a regular contributor here:

Have you looked at this browser yet:

http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/en

?

I do not know what it is about sidebar's in OS X apps,
but I love them! A sidebar in any app for me, just
gives me so much more productivity within the
application, and I tend to only use apps that have
sidebar functionality. Brilliant in my perspective.

Let me know what you think about the browser, I am
almost ready to make it my default. I just need to
turn off underlining of links - I can't
stand that for some reason.

So I went back to http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/en and found that they now do have a nice little browser - in fact, two little browsers. In addition to the "normal" version, they have one that runs in the Dashboard. I can't see the value of that, but then I don't like Dashboard apps anyway - I almost never use them.

But the ordinary Shiira browser does have some interesting features. As you'd expect, it supports tabs, but also adds a "Show All Tabs" features which displays all your current tabs much as Expose would display application windows. Like Expose, click on the one you want.

Shiira can turn on fancy graphic features if your hardware and OS support it. Here's a movie demo of what it looks like, though on my MacBook the effect was much faster than the movie shows.

Shiira's RSS features are simple and well implemented: it displays RSS feeds directly (as Safari does) but you subscribe simply by bookmarking the page. A bookmarked feed then appears in the RSS sidebar tab rather than the ordinary bookmarks.

Shiira's "page holder" feature is possibly interesting. This is a sidebar where you can add pages. The concept is a little confusing, and they don't explain it well, so let's take it slowly:

Let's say you are viewing this page in Shiira and want to come back to it after following other links. You have several choices for that. You could bookmark it, you could open the other links in new windows or new tabs, or you could just use the "Back" arrows to come back. With Shiira, you have another choice: open the sidebar "Page Holder" window and click the "+" icon. Your page appears in the Page Holder sidebar. If you click on links in that window, they open in the main browser. I'm not sure I'd use this much, but it culd be handy for things like Google searches - keeping the results page in the Page Holder window and reviewing the links in the main.

Shiira can import Safari and Firefox bookmarks. Unfortunately (and this is always the killer for me) it can't use Firefox extensions. Firefox is a buggy and cantankerous thing, but I have grown to depend on several of its extensions. Without those, I really don't want to switch to anything else. I think it would be great if extensions were portable, but they aren't, so while browsers like Shiira are attractive and interesting, I won't be switching.

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