Swiftfox

The Swiftfox build is optimized using the following methods:

Binary code optimization

• Compiled with the highest level of compiler optimization, rather than optimization for binary size.
  • Swiftfox is compiled -O3,[1][2] (the highest level)
    • The resulting Swiftfox binary is larger than Firefox. (-O3 is not necessarily faster than -O2, or -Os. -O3 introduces two more options on top of -O2: -finline-functions and -frename-registers. The latter is good for CPUs with many registers but may actually be slower on other CPUs.[3])
  • Firefox is compiled -Os.[2] (-Os is the same as -O2 but removes optimizations which would increase the binary size.[3])
• Binaries incorporate additional instruction sets.[4]
  • Intel and AMD: MMX, SSE, SSE2, (not generally SSE3[5]).
  • AMD only: 3DNow!
• Optimization specific to the build microprocessor architecture.[4]
  • Intel: Pentium 4, Pentium 3, Pentium M, Pentium III, Pentium II, Pentium 4 (Prescott).
  • AMD64: Athlon64 (32bit binary).
  • AMD: Athlon XP, Athlon, K6-2.
• Compiled with newer version of GCC (Firefox 2.0 uses 3.3.2, Swiftfox 2.0 uses 4.0.4).[2]

Increased security

• Better protection from buffer overflow attacks[6] (Swiftfox 2.0 uses -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2; Firefox 2.0 uses gcc 3.x, which does not support this).[2]

Simplify

• Pango is not included in the build . This means that Unicode fonts remain supported (see Unicode and HTML), but without certain extra features[7] provided by Pango. This simplification reduces the binary size, and reduces rendering.

Changed default preference values

• IPv6 DNS lookups are disabled.[4][8] preventing slowdowns experienced[9]
• HTTP pipelining is enabled by default.[4][8] Fasterfox provides a GUI to adjust these settings.
• For full details, see .

No definitive benchmarking has been reported, but a quicker startup time and a 1.7% webpage rendering speedup has been reported on version 1.5.0.6.[10] There are no benchmarks for the different processors builds.

Swiftfox is bundled with the following freely available Firefox plugins and extensions:

• XForms extension is installed and enabled
• libunixprintplugin.so plugin is installed

The same as Firefox, the Swiftfox source code is open-source, with the source code under MPL 1.1 except for parts relating to branding.[11] Unlike Firefox, the Swiftfox binaries have a proprietary license[11] which does not allow redistribution. According to the author, this is to prevent the possibility of any confusion with tainted versions (see the Firefox branding argument Mozilla Firefox#Trademark and logo issues). The name Swiftfox is trademarked by Jason Halme, and accordingly cannot be used on other third party Firefox builds without his permission.

• Firefox
• Swiftweasel

• Official website (archived)