Another day, another cool new WebKit-related application that made me stop what I was doing and take some screenshots! In this case, I also took a couple of home movies to demonstrate features that words may not quite do justice to. What am I talking about tonight? Much to my delight, I’m referring to the new public beta release of Shiira 2.0, an open source web browser based on Apple’s WebKit and its WebCore/JavaScriptCore framework.

Most of the folks who wander into this blog from a Mac OS X background have undoubtedly tried Shiira before. The project’s humble goal is “to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari.” That goal has been elusive in the past, although Shiira 1.2 has certainly put WebKit through some powerful experiments and come up with a few features that Apple would do well to emulate (draggable tabs, anyone?). But mark my words… if the Shiira team finishes version 2.0 before Apple unveils Safari 3.0 next spring with the launch of Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”), they will have accomplished their goal—at least for a little while.

This prediction is based on no more than an hour of browsing and tinkering with the as-yet-unfinished Shiira 2.0 beta release. I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow of Shiira 2.0 here. (For that, check out this useful “visual preview” of Shiira 2.0.) Instead, I want to highlight a couple of the features that I think could very well lead me to switch from Safari to Shiira once the developers complete a few more of the missing functionalities (e.g., bookmark bar). In my opinion, this browser is that good.

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