Shiira

» see shiira.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

From 2004 to 2009 my browser question had exactly two sides. Internet Explorer was what came with the machine and Firefox was what you installed to get away from it, and that was the entire argument on a Windows desktop in Ankara. Shiira belonged to a different argument in a room I was never in, one where the default browser was already good and the question was whether somebody could do better than good.

Version 0.9 arrived on 11 April 2004, written by Makoto Kinoshita under the banner of the Shiira Project. Shiira is the Japanese name for the dolphinfish, which puts it in the same water as Safari's whole marine-naming habit without being a joke about it. It was open source, written in Objective-C and Cocoa, and it rendered pages with WebKit, the same engine Apple shipped.

That last fact is the entire strategic position. Using WebKit meant Shiira never had to fight the compatibility war that killed most alternative browsers, because any site that worked in Safari worked here. It also meant the product could not differentiate on anything the engine did. Kinoshita said outright that the goal was a browser better and more useful than Safari, and since the insides were identical, better had to mean the window.

So the work went into the window. Tab Exposé laid every open tab out at full size in the manner of the operating system's own Exposé, so you picked the page by looking at it rather than by reading a truncated title. The 1.x line animated a page turn between documents, which was dropped in 2.x once the joke wore thin. Version 2.0 threw out the sidebar drawer for floating palettes and let thumbnail tabs sit along any edge of the window. Skins were supported. Very little of this was structural and all of it was the point.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ceiling ~

A browser built on the market leader's own engine is competing on the leader's leftovers. Everything it wins on is something the leader has not gotten around to yet, which is a real advantage and a rented one. It works exactly as long as the leader stays uninterested.

Safari kept shipping. The interface ideas that made Shiira worth the extra download stopped being missing, and full-window tab overviews are now so ordinary that every browser on every phone has one. Reviewers in 2007 were still calling Shiira a serious contender for best browser on the Mac, and by 2009 the honest recommendation for almost everybody was to stay where they were. The requirement was Mac OS X 10.4 or later; 1.2.2 was the last build for 10.3, and the audience got narrower every time Apple moved.

~ the last release ~

Version 2.3 came out on 11 August 2009 and that was the end of it. No announcement, no farewell post, no handover to a successor project. By December 2011 the developer's website had been removed. This is the ordinary ending for a one-person project and it is worth saying plainly: most software does not get shut down, it gets stopped, and the difference is that nobody sends a notice.

~ what is at the address now ~

shiira.jp resolves today, in Japanese, and it belongs to a company called Shiira Inc. that repairs Macs. The site says it starts operating in 2026 and advertises logic board work and maintenance on Apple silicon machines, the kind of repair that keeps a laptop alive past the point where the manufacturer would prefer you bought a new one.

Same word, same fish, same platform, different trade. One Shiira tried to make the Mac a better place to read the web and gave up when Apple caught up. The other one solders. Of the two, the soldering is the more durable business, because Apple has never shown much interest in that leftover either.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »