Shiira Options

[Peter Evans]

I noticed some mention somewhere of Shiira as an ambitious if immature and fragile browser (for Mac OS X), and downloaded it out of idle curiosity.

It starts by announcing a fatal error (or similar), but I ignore that and it goes ahead and shows the "site". (On my hard drive: the computer isn't connected to the web.) It then shows a page without graphics. Having been reconfigured to display graphics from any site (not just that of the HTML file), it goes ahead and displays graphics below within the same directory structure.

Seems a bit dodgy, doesn't it? But the extraordinary thing is that after these initial hiccups it's surprisingly good.

I wrote a presentation for HTML Slidy that I thought I'd show with either Firefox or Safari: each of these gets it 98% right but the remainder slightly wrong in an elusive kind of way. (Opera does a significantly worse job.) Shiira does it immaculately, and it's what I now expect to use.

I haven't tried Shiira in the real world of tag soup, browser sniffing and miscellaneous idiocy, but this is a browser worth watching and for some purposes already worth using in preference to the obvious choices.

(I note that it's said to use the same rendering engine as Safari: its slight superiority may just be a matter of being freshly downloaded and thus bang up to date.)