Update: Development on Swift has resumed! You can download the new 0.2 version from the Swift site.
It all started a couple of weeks ago when a client kept sending revisions for their website. We were confused as his revisions concerned portions of the site that didn’t seem broken, at least to us.
Later, it was discovered that the client exclusively uses a Mac and Safari was rendering our work differently. Borrowing a Mac from the company’s execs wasn’t really an option, so I went around looking for a way to view sites the way Safari would render them. I came a cross browsercam sites BrowsrCamp and iCapture but both were slow and overall an inefficient way to tackle the problem.
Eventually, I came across a few sites making mention of a Windows browser called Swift that utilized WebKit just like Safari. I discovered that the project, while still in it’s alpha stages, seems to have been abandoned. Scouring the web for mirrors, I found that there were none. I wasn’t able to find any mention of it on WebKit’s site, as if the project was erased from history. Disappointed, I made it a point to try looking for it again sometime in the future, perhaps something will come up.
A few days ago, I came across Dave’s post. He had a copy of the files for Swift! I downloaded it immediately and attempted to run it. It gave me an error, citing something about the configuration. I contacted Dave and he provided the proper installer for Swift. I tried again but this time I got errors saying something about being unable to register WebKit.dll. After a quick search of the phrase in the error on Google, I discovered that I needed some Visual Studio runtime libraries to get it to run. So I installed the libraries, reinstalled Swift and it worked!
I tried the client’s site again and it was showing the same bugs as the ones I saw on the browser cam site. I never in my life thought that I’d be so glad to see such glaring and consistent errors.
Thanks Dave.
- Swift Browser mirror (21MB, zipped)
If you get an error that says it’s unable to register WebKit.dll, you need to install this:
- Visual Studio 2005 runtime libraries (2.5MB)
Take note that Swift never left the alpha stages, you may experience frequest crashes and be aware that forms do not work.
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November 7th, 2006 at 7:47 am
The WebKit project didn’t erase Swift from history at all. The developer was not at all involved in the WebKit community, including the grunt work of porting WebKit to Windows. When he threw in the towel and ceased development of Swift on his own accord. I’ve heard murmurs that he may be getting back into things… here’s hoping he gets involved with the WebKit community this time around
November 7th, 2006 at 8:25 am
I see, thanks for the heads up. I assumed that there must have been some regular communication between the two because most of the sites I’ve found were almost always linking to the Swift and WebKit projects side by side
I hope he continues his work, this is the only convenient way to at least make me feel comfy that my designs won’t explode on Safari. The application itself loads just as fast as Opera and faster than Firefox or IE7 which is always a good thing.