The Linux Extremist

When I first tried Firefox on Linux, I thought to myself “Things simply don’t get better than this”. I had never used a quicker browser; it seemed to be making the most of my broadband connection. Never before had the internet seemed so accessible.

I then learned about some tweaks one can apply to Firefox. After making these modifications, again, I thought, “Well, it couldn’t get better than this!” I have been very happy with its performance and wondered how it could be improved further still. Given how fast it was, it seemed unlikely.

Happily, this has come to pass. An optimised build of Firefox for Linux, called appropriately enough, Swiftfox, is by far the fastest and best browser I’ve ever used.

For Ubuntu users, installation is painless. Simply one has to go to www.getswiftfox.com, and click on the link to get the Ubuntu distribution. The package works well with Ubuntu Dapper Drake’s GDebi package management system and installs perfectly.

However, a slight bit of tweaking is required to make it available to the menu system. First, go to Applications >> Accessories >> Terminal. Then type in the following.

cd /usr/lib/swiftfox/icons

This will take you to a directory with all the Swiftfox icons you’d care to use. In my case, I chose to use the 128 x 128 pixel icon, which is entitled mozicon128.png. I tend to like to keep all my menu icons in one directory, namely, /usr/share/pixmaps. In order to get the Swiftfox of my choice into that directory, I typed

sudo cp mozicon128.png /usr/share/pixmaps

Type in your root password when asked, and then the icon will be copied into the appropriate directory.

One can keep using both Swiftfox and Firefox; the only problem is that every time one engages either programme after using the other, it acts like it is a “first time” launch. In my case, I chose to simply replace any launcher for Firefox with a launcher for Swiftfox. In order to do so on the main menu in Ubuntu, right click on “Applications” and select, “Edit Menus”. The Alacarte Menu Editor will appear. Select “Internet” on the left hand side of the panel. Then right click on the Firefox icon on the right hand side of the panel, and select properties. Click on the Firefox icon, navigate to /usr/share/pixmaps, to find the Swiftfox icons. All instances of “firefox”, whether in the title or in the Command should be replaced with “swiftfox”. Once done, click “Close”.

All that said, it is possible to make Swiftfox even faster. Start it up, and enter in “about:config” as a web address. Scroll down to a value entitled network.http.pipelining.requests. Right click on that and choose “Modify”. Swiftfox sets this value at 8; with a good broadband connection, one can push it to 30 without any problems.

Once this value is set, then right click anywhere on the screen and choose New and then Integer. Enter the new value’s name, which is nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and set it to “0″.

With Swiftfox and these small tweaks, I’ve had a browser which is definitely the best web browsing experience to date. In fact, I can only think of one fault with it. Really, the developers have done such a bang up job making it so that Linux users get the most out of the web, surely they should do it also for the users of BSD.

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