I have been test driving a new browser made by a group of Japanese geeks programmers called “Shiira“. It’s basically Safari with some nice features under its hood. Or… maybe it should be called Safari 2.5.
The best thing about this browser is its sidebar feature. It’s like using Safari with Concierge for free. Another feature I really like (though never actually use) is “Tab Exposé”. The feature basically turns all the open tabs in the browser into little thumbnails, much like what Foxposé does in Firefox. With a faster processor, the browser can even micmic page turning by using animation. It’s a nice but really unnecessary feature though.
I got used to the browser pretty quickly because the developers made it very easy to adopt this browser by having all the Safari functionalities already there, including access to Safari’s bookmarks! It also feels like Shiira launches and loads pages faster than all the other browsers on the Mac platform. Firefox is a dog compared to this Japanese import. Oh, and this puppy has yet to crash on me yet. Damn, those Japanese know what they are doing!
Unfortunately, Shiira also shares Safari’s downside on poor memory management. I can’t blame them. After all, Shiira shares the same render engine as Safari (and probably a few other things too). A nice full day of work out with this browser hogs almost 300MB of RAM (though its initial RAM occupation is far less than any other browser).