Swift 6.1 – New Capabilities

Swift is a modern web chat client, designed to be used anywhere, on any device. It enables you to deploy a high capacity, secure chat solution across your network with zero footprint deployment.

Swift is based on the XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) family of open standards, which is the leading open standard for chat.

The latest release of Swift brings with it a host of upgrades and improvements, the main features can be seen below.

Bandwidth/latency improvements

While the recommended deployment for Swift has good connectivity between the browser and the Swift server, a number of enhancements have been made to reduce bandwidth and latency impacts. These include support for the HTTP/2 protocol, compression of content and HTTP headers, use of “etags” in requests to elide transmission of unchanged data and a reduction in the number of HTTP requests.

History scrollback

Message Archive Management (MAM) support has been enhanced, and it is now possible to “Load more messages” to scroll back through a chat as far as the XMPP server’s archive allows.

Form Discovery and Publishing

An initial implementation of the Form Discovery and Publishing (FDP) standard is provided, allowing publishing forms, sending a reference to a published form to a MUC room, and displaying referenced forms inline in the chat view.

File sharing improvements

A number of enhancements have been made to file upload and download.

• The file download now uses the built-in browser facility, allowing the browser to show download progress as with other files.
• Chats now support Drag/Drop and Copy/Paste for attaching files to the chat.
• File attachments can now be auto-previewed (displayed inline) for images and video, with attachment auto-preview controlled by source domain whitelisting.
• The file attachment UI has been made clearer around sending the attachment or removing the attachment before sending a message.

UTC timestamps

A system-wide option has been added to display message timestamps in UTC.

Other enhancements

• The contact list now shows status icons if a contact’s status message begins with an emoji.
• Chats can now be “muted”, preventing notifications or unread markers for a duration.
• Messages now show as a placeholder in chat while they are sending.
• Message send failures now have a clearer UI.
• The Windows service has been renamed for consistency with other Isode products