First Look: Shiira

 

I am tired of Firefox losing it’s mind — must be a memory leak in there, somewhere — so I have periodically looked at alternatives. The obvious alternative, Safari, feels too clunky, somehow. I tried Camino and I might go back to using it since it is supposed to be fast, and it supports stuff I use all the time, like blummy, but I don’t like the way any of these browsers treat RSS. Even the Sage plug-in for Firefox is convoluted.

I stumbled across Shiira the other day, a browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. It is insanely beautiful, and I particularly like the design used for bookmarks: a side panel slides out from the right or left — your choice — and any RSS feeds are handled as an RSS reader would:

The use of the vertical tabs is clever, too.

Awesome! But then… disaster struck when I tried to open Google Calendar, and got this message:

Not supporting gCalendar is really a show stopper for me. I guess I could try to live using multiple browsers, but the world is based on the notion of a default browser — you click a link and something must pop — so, for the moment, I can’t go with Shiira. Hopefully they will solve this problem, and I will be able to explore Shiira further.

I may try to use it as an RSS reader, but I don’t generally read that way much. I might just leave it open in the background, since the RSS feature is linked to Growl — I get notifications when my favorites have new stuff to read. Then I will browse using Firefox, or something. More to follow.

[Update: 10:30am — I discovered that Safari is not a supported browser for Googel Calendar, and it exhibits exactly the same javascript errors as Shiira. It could be that Shiira is using the Safari engine, and as soon — if ever — as Apple sorts out the issues involved, both browsers might work.