SwiftFox 3.5.7

January 23, 2010 by awang

Swiftfox is an optimized build of Firefox that’s faster and more cutting edge than the regular Firefox distribution. It works with Firefox plugins, making it remarkably extensible. The overall user interface is similar to Firefox, but is a bit more minimalist and clutter-free. Most other features are in line with what Firefox has to offer.

Swiftfox has builds for both AMD and Intel processors. The 2.0.0.1 release is based on Firefox 2.0.0.1. The trunk is the most cutting edge of all the builds and is where Firefox 3 is being developed. It was created by Jason Halme and is a freely downloadable application. And for the optimization level to be even higher, specific builds for each of the supported microprocessor architectures have been created separately. The current version of Firefox is available, as well as the development version, each having specific builds. Moreover, the extensions, plugins and themes one has used with Firefox are fully compatible with Swiftfox. If both browsers are used within the same Unix user, the add-ons will be shared from one another, removing the need to re-install them all over again when switching to Swiftox or back to Firefox.

Several magazines have evaluated Swiftfox in the context of the fastest browsers. But this isn’t really the case. With or without pipelining, Firefox has the tendency to render pages a bit slower than Konqueror or even Internet Explorer. However, Swiftfox has been reported to have a shorter loading and page rendering time. So bottom line: Swiftfox is faster than Firefox, both in loading speed and website rendering. Unfortunately, the leader still is Konqueror running within KDE with times lower than both Firefox and Swiftfox.

Swiftfox comes with XForms extension and libunixprintplugin.so plugin preinstalled. Most of microprocessor architectures are supported but there are, however, a few unsupported, such as Pentium w/ MMX and PRO, K6, K6-3 and furthermore, a build for dual core processors hasn’t been developed. Each supported microprocessor architecture has its own separate specific builds. Each build has been compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization and has additional instruction sets incorporated within. Overall, it does decrease the loading and page rendering times compared to Firefox. If you are a Firefox addict and you’re running Linux, you should give Swiftfox a try. It will definitely amaze you. More or less however, depending on your cpu architecture and Internet connection.

Why you have to consider it ??

Binary code optimization
The Swiftfox executable has been compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization, rather than optimization for binary size. The compiler supports various flags that will perform different optimization levels during the compilation process. Firefox is compiled with -Os flag (which enables only the optimizations that don’t increase code size and also a few optimizations designed to reduce code size), while Swiftfox is compiled with -O3 flag, which basically turns on all available optimizations. Binaries incorporate additional instruction sets supported by and also optimization specific to the microprocessor architecture. Moreover, Swiftfox has been compiled with a newer version of the compiler program (GCC v 4.0.4), while Firefox uses v 3.3.2.
Increased security
Swiftfox offers better protection against buffer overflow attacks as a result of using -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 while compilation. Firefox has been compiled with an older version of GCC, which doesn’t support this.
Removed or disabled features
Pango is not included, allowing Unicode fonts to remain supported, but without certain extra features provided by it. Pango is an open source computing library for rendering internationalized texts in high quality, integrated into GTK+ 2. Moreover, Ipv6 DNS lookups are disabled.
Changed default preferences values
HTTP pipelining is enabled by default. This is a technique in which multiple HTTP requests are written out to a single socket without waiting for the corresponding responses but unfortunately, it’s only supported in HTTP/1.1, not in HTTP/1.0. The pipelining of requests results in dramatic improvement in page loading times, especially over high latency connections such as a satellite or wireless Internet connection. However, this preference can be enabled in Firefox 2.0 or one can use an extension called Fastefox, which provides a GUI to adjust these settings.

Operating System Supported : Linux

Here you can download :

1. Download Installer

2. Download Deb Files (Debian Package)

3. Download Tarballs (Red Hat Package)