Swiftweasel was a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from '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 either to h ...

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 curren ...

available for the

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

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 (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 files ...

incorporate additional

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, s ...

s: **

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

: SSE,

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. SSE2 instructions allow the use of ...

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 central processing unit, CPUs for Desktop computer, desktops, laptops and entry-level Server (computing), servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 20 ...

Pentium M The Pentium M is a family of mobile 32-bit single-core x86 microprocessors (with the modified Intel P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture) introduced in March 2003 and forming a part of the Intel Centrino#Carmel platform (2003), Carmel no ...

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), P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999 ...

Pentium II The Pentium II is a brand of sixth-generation Intel x86 microprocessors based on the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture, introduced on May 7, 1997. It combined the ''P6'' microarchitecture seen on the Pentium Pro with the MMX (instruc ...

; **

64bit: Nocona; **

: Athlon XP,

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

, K6-2,

; **

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new operating modes: 64-bit mode an ...

: Athlon64,

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

. *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 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 name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various informatio ...

lookups are disabled, preventing slowdowns; * HTTP pipelining is enabled by default. Note that Fasterfox provides a GUI 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 (proof theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values t ...

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 Eyeo GmbH, a German software company. The extension has been released for Mozilla Firefox (including mobile), Google Chro ...

* 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 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 natural phenomenon consisting of electrostatic discharges occurring through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions. One or both regions are within the atmosphere, with the second region sometimes occurring on ...

calendar plugin installed by default.

References

External links

Swiftweasel site

Software Headlines

Softpedia review of Swiftweasel 3.0.1

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