Swift rocks

I’ve hit a few discussions about “another browser” – meaning – yea, yea, we all know IE, Firefox, most of us have heard about Opera, many are waiting for Flock 1.0… But we like to want more… 🙂

So, Seamonkey? Could be, waiting for 1.5 with more new goodies, according to my lurking in bonsai.mozilla.org, it progresses pretty good.

Konqueror? Well, it’ll be interesting, but not before Q3 2007 (KDE4 for Windows current target date).

Amaya? Jokes over…

Well, I really, and I mean – REALLY – like Swift. It’s freakin fast for me. My (very amateurish) test:

1) Page load time. www.mozilla.com – Gecko 1.9a – 4,36 sec,  Opera 9.02 – 3.76, Swift 0.2 – 2,60 sec

2) Reload (without shift+reload) – Gecko 1.9a – 4,32 sec, Opera 9.02 – 3,15, Swift 0.2 – 0,95 sec. (AAAGGH!)

Swift was also the only browser that did not repaint anything beside of the area of screen that changed. Opera repainted everything and presented a white page for a second during this, and Mozilla repainted everything but the top menu.

3) jogger.pl (for the first time) – Gecko 1.9a – 3 sec, Opera 9.02 – 4 sec, Swift 0.2 – 1 sec.

It’s really crazy, it seems for me like if Swift would use some cheats on the TCP/IP stack, since Opera and Fx take more time to actually connect with the website, than Swift to download and render it. cheaters…

With Swift I had an *experience* like if I was surfing the smoothest way.

Of course, as always in such cases, the results may vary. It may work rather slow for many of you, it may crash, kill your cat or whatever. For me it works amazing, and I tested it in various environments (laptop, desktop, different providers etc.)

Kudos to the authors, whoever they are (Apple/KDE folks?)

update: did I already praised their Options menu? People tend to say that Opera and Microsoft should learn from Firefox… well, everyone should learn from Swift than – simple, clean, just neat…