I’ve come across a new browser for the Macintosh platform called Shiira. I heard about it a while ago but since then I’ve opted for Camino and enjoyed it as an alternative to Safari. After using Shiira, I think I’m going to uninstall Camino!

There are so many cool features in Shiira. One of the best is the ability to perform an expose-type gallery of all your open tabs. What an awesome feature! I’ve also looked at the Omniweb browser and liked their tab-thumbnail feature but I prefer Shiira’s expose-style gallery of tabs a lot more. It saves a lot of screen space over a page-thumbnail/sidebar implementation and that’s a big concern for me since I don’t like my 12.1-inch iBook screen to be filled with one application.

Speaking of sidebar, there’s one in Shiira too. The sidebar has vertical tabs titled: Bookmars, History, Download, Page holder and RSS. The Bookmarks tab allows you to manage bookmarks. It even allows you to import your Safari or Firefox bookmarks! The Download tab allows you to see all active downloads and pause/stop them and the RSS tab allows you to read and search all of your RSS feeds. The RSS tab is amazing. It took a while for me to get used to it because adding RSS feeds wasn’t as simple as doing so in Safari. The feature that makes it so amazing is that I don’t have to load the RSS feed contents in the main browser window. The RSS tab consists of two windows: A list of RSS feeds and a corresponding RSS article viewer. Simply click on an unread article and the contents are displayed in that part of the sidebar. I haven’t played around with the Page Holder tab yet so I can’t offer any comments on it.

I recommend Shiira to anyone who’d like to try out something other than Safari. Although both browsers are great in their own right, Shiira is definitely one of the best browsers I’ve ever used.