Swiftweasel was a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and a ...

available for the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

platform only.

Optimization

Swiftweasel is optimized using the following methods:

P.G.O.

As of the 3.0.3 release, Swiftweasel has shifted its primary optimization from processor specific to

profile-guided optimization Profile-guided optimization (PGO, sometimes pronounced as ''pogo''), also known as profile-directed feedback (PDF), and feedback-directed optimization (FDO) is a compiler optimization technique in computer programming that uses profiling to impr ...

(PGO). It is a two step building process. The application is compiled one time and then run to produce a profile. The profile is then used to guide a second compilation of the application. Some of the older optimizations are still used, but there are now only Intel and AMD versions of each build. It is released compiled in a tar.gz package. There are also separate installers for Ubuntu and Arch linux available through their communities.

Binary code optimization

*Swiftweasel is compiled with options that optimize for speed rather than binary size. ** Compiled with the -O3 compile flagUse the in-browser about:buildconfig URL to check the details of all builds (the highest level),
with the resulting Swiftweasel binary being larger than that of Firefox. **Firefox is compiled with the -Os compile flag,Use the in-browser about:buildconfig URL to check the details of 2.0 builds which is for binary size. *

Binaries A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document file ...

incorporate additional

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...

s: **

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

: SSE,

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. It extends the earlier Streamin ...

SSE3 SSE3, Streaming SIMD Extensions 3, also known by its Intel code name Prescott New Instructions (PNI), is the third iteration of the SSE instruction set for the IA-32 (x86) architecture. Intel introduced SSE3 in early 2004 with the Prescott revis ...

, and MMX. **

only:

3DNow! 3DNow! is a deprecated extension to the x86 instruction set developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It adds single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions to the base x86 instruction set, enabling it to perform vector processing of float ...

*Optimization specific to the build microprocessor architecture. **

32bit: Pentium 4 (Prescott),

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 2000 ...

Pentium M The Pentium M is a family of mobile 32-bit single-core x86 microprocessors (with the modified Intel P6 microarchitecture) introduced in March 2003 and forming a part of the Intel Carmel notebook platform under the then new Centrino brand. The '' ...

Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial p ...

Pentium II The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...

; **

64bit: Nocona; **

Athlon XP Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the fi ...

Athlon Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the fi ...

K6-2 The K6-2 is an x86 microprocessor introduced by AMD on May 28, 1998, and available in speeds ranging from 266 to 550 MHz. An enhancement of the original K6, the K6-2 introduced AMD's 3DNow! SIMD instruction set, featured a larger 64 KiB Le ...

; **

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

Athlon64 The Athlon 64 is a ninth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name ''Athlon'', and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP. T ...

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''SledgeHa ...

. *Compiled with newer versions of GCC (Firefox 2.0 uses 3.3.2, Swiftweasel 2.0 uses 4.0.3, and Swiftweasel 3.0.3 uses 4.2.3). Increased Security *Better protection from

Buffer overflow In information security and programming, a buffer overflow, or buffer overrun, is an anomaly whereby a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations. Buffers are areas of memory ...

attacks (Swiftweasel 2.0 uses -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2; Firefox 2.0 uses gcc 3.x, which does not support this). Simplify *

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

lookups are disabled, preventing slowdowns; *

HTTP pipelining HTTP pipelining is a feature of HTTP/1.1 which allows multiple HTTP requests to be sent over a single TCP connection without waiting for the corresponding responses. HTTP/1.1 requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, with non-p ...

is enabled by default. Note that Fasterfox provides a

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

to adjust these settings. *For full details, users ca
download source packages
with all changes listed.

Installed extensions

Swiftweasel has several

extensions Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate * Ex ...

installed by default. *

XForms XForms is an XML format used for collecting inputs from web forms. XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner or with presentation languages other tha ...

AdBlock Plus Adblock Plus (ABP) is a free and open-source browser extension for content-filtering and ad blocking. It is developed by developer Wladimir Palant's Eyeo GmbH, a German software company. The extension has been released for Mozilla Firefox ( ...

* User Agent Switcher * Quick Locale Switcher

Swiftweasel-specific changes

Changes made to Swiftweasel include: * The default icon set has been replaced with the KempeltonKempelton
/ref> icon set. * Swiftweasel uses its own settings directory. The settings, including bookmarks, history, and extensions are imported from

the first time Swiftweasel runs. * Plugins stored in /lib/mozilla/plugins and /lib/Firefox/plugins are detected and used by Swiftweasel.

Swiftdove

The Swiftweasel project also builds optimized 32 and 64bit builds of the

Thunderbird Thunderbird, thunder bird or thunderbirds may refer to: * Thunderbird (mythology), a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture * Ford Thunderbird, a car Birds * Dromornithidae, extinct flightless birds k ...

email client known as Swiftdove.

Optimizations

As of the current version 2.0.0.21, Swiftdove is also PGO optimized.

Plugins

The 2.0.0.21 builds of Swiftdove include the 0.9

Lightning Lightning is a naturally occurring electrostatic discharge during which two electric charge, electrically charged regions, both in the atmosphere or with one on the land, ground, temporarily neutralize themselves, causing the instantaneous ...

calendar plugin installed by default.

References

External links

Swiftweasel site

Software Headlines

Softpedia review of Swiftweasel 3.0.1

Browser Wars
Free web browsers Web browsers based on Firefox POSIX web browsers Discontinued web browsers {{web-software-stub