The slow progress of Swift

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

The developer of Swift, the browser that was set to be the first native to Windows to use the WebKit rendering engine, has announced that development with WebKit is to be halted as the Windows port is unstable, and future versions will be based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine until WebKit stabilises, at which point Swift will switch back to it.

So I have to ask: what will Swift bring to the table without WebKit? We already have a bunch of Gecko-based browsers, and we have no information about what features Swift will implement.

I was pretty enthused when Swift was announced; even if it just had basic functionality, the fact that it was based on WebKit was pretty exciting. But as we’ve seen just two rudimentary pre-Alpha releases in almost 10 months, and no roadmap or project information is available on the website, this is turning into vapourware for me.

1 comment on
“The slow progress of Swift”

  1. Hello.

    I noticed a link-back on my blog to this site. To be very honest, yes, the development is going very slow, with school/2 jobs, and exploring options on where I can take this.

    Now, a guy who I never knew before, had added me on MSN, talked a bit, and presented me to a link on Adobe’s SVN. From what little I know about Adobe and their Open-Source projects, they have a version of WebKit in their SVN (that works, lol) mixed in with some of their Apollo code. (Named ApolloWebKit).

    I still want to have a gecko version, so I can explore what new innovative features can be added to Swift, but there will always remain a WebKit version, and it should be more up to date soon with the findings of Adobe’s Apollo WebKit.

    The whole point of Swift was to be a proof of concept that WebKit can run on Windows and there would be a basic browser around it. A guy I know (By the nick of TechHut/Bash) digged my site and it’s turned into pretty much an internet phenonemum.

    Swift will always have a WebKit version, even if the win32 WebKit dev is slow. Apple no longer maintians the port, and if I can find some C++ developers, I would like to maintian a port myself (I’m not very good in C++, hence the switch to .net, which i’m awesome in.)

    Please bear with us, I want a final release of Swift as much as any other fan of the browser. It will take time, but despite being slow, it WILL get done.

    If anyone has the need to contact the developer (I love e-mails, I really do, honestly) feel free to send e-mail to chris -at- swift.ws

    If you would like to talk in IRC, feel free to stop in irc.zimmy.ca #Zimmy and discuss Swift in my channel.