If anyone is interested in a modern take on a lightweight, embeddable web browser / browser engine (that supports features like Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS variables, media queries, etc), then I'm building one over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit.
EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal.
I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages.
It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.
I noticed the original commit to Git was October 2007 - but if you look at that commit it include this Changelog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6... which has the earliest entry of:
dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999]
I used to use it, like over 20 years ago! Mozilla Suite was too slow for my taste and I only reached for it if Dillo couldn't render a page :)
IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.
Was a lifesaver to me back in the day, running my frankenstein machine pieced together from useless spares I cobbled together from the computer store I worked at briefly. Every piece of software I ran was trimmed down to the absolute minimum, and it was a time before the web was completely unusuable without an ad blocker. Fond memories of Dillo.
I'm impressed. It runs my dev blog quite well. Some of the CSS alignment is off and it doesn't load web fonts, but it looks basically the same as Chrome. Even the syntax highlighted code snippets work.
Having never used Dillo before, I just installed it and tried it. And then I found out that it does not support JavaScript at all. There aren’t many or any sites/apps that I regularly use that would work without JavaScript. That limits its usefulness.
I installed the latest (version 1.4) FreeDOS just now and keeping half an eye on the installer as names of installed packages flashed by I noticed Dillo. Is DOS still a supported platform or is FreeDOS shipping some old version? I hope it is the former.
i first met Dillo pre-installed on a DamnSmall Linux CD back around 2005. i also had quite low performance PCs as others say. i browsed via Dillo till my pentium MMX laptop died in 2010 (coincidence?)
the other good browser I was happily using on old machines is Elinks. AFAIK it's also picked up again to continue its development, although it's terminal-based.
wish endurance for the developers!
Previous/related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
Dillo works surprisingly well. I've used it on older systems running new operating systems. It does a web browser should do best: read web pages.
Dillo was included in the historic Damn Small Linux [1], a 50MB distro.
How is the name pronounced? Is it said like the pickle (Dill-O) or with the Spanish double L (diyo) or something else?
Are there any plans to sandbox the content handling (e.g. HTML parsing and image loading) in a separate process to mitigate e.g. memory-safety issues and other security problems?
Firefox [1] and Chrome [2] use seccomp-bpf and various other Linux-specific APIs to implement their sandboxes. FreeBSD provides Capsicum [3] for this, but it's not supported by Firefox or Chrome.
Maybe Dillo could use the newer Landlock API [4] on Linux, which is being evaluated [5] for Chrome. This API seems more similar to Capsicum, so it might make it easier to support FreeBSD as well.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
[3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum
Cool, I installed it on a Mac with M1, which gives you a glimpse how fast live could be without bloat.
Using it shows how rotten the World Wide Web has become, with mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com, which I was not aware of.
I'm very much looking forward to Ladybird's first alpha release next August.
I may be imagining this, but I'm nearly certain I was running dillo on a PDA (I want to say Palm Treo) around 2001. I remember it feeling revolutionary to open up a webpage on something other than my linux desktop computer at the time. Over Wifi!
I hope it survives another 25 years.
`brew install dillo` on Macs (and see [0] for other platforms)
and then `dillo` starts up a 1.1Mb executable that is so freaking, shockingly fast.
TIL I also learned that although the Google homepage renders beautifully, I need to "Turn on JavaScript to keep searching" [1]
Wow, Google Maps is even snarky-ish about it: "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." (that's what appears! for real)
I mean, what was I expecting. U+1F643.
[0] https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/insta...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begi...
Hi, netsurf provides separate html, css and dom parser as an independent lib [1]. Does dillo provide the same?
Seems like a nice addition to the suckless ecosystem. Hah, it’s even listed in their awesome software list https://suckless.org/rocks/
If I want to know what kind of site I can make compatible with Dillo, is a list of supported elements available?
I can't help but try to find the second 'd' ...
Dillo gave new life to lots of hardware out there that could have otherwise end up in the trash. Many thanks.
My adblocker is the one thing that makes my browser pages lightweight.
So my question would be: does it have a good adblocker?
Holy fuck, is Dillo still going? thats amazing work. I remember using it with compiz and that whole generation of early 64bit software.
Hmm am I missing something? I wanted to download this either for Windows or Mac but I can't find the download link anywhere. It looks Linux only, but the title of this post says Multi-platform.
Make it easier for people to download this please. I clicked releases on the hoem page and i get a zip file with a whole bunch of stuff a file named Dillo.Desktop which double clicking tries to open in Gimp and then does nothing. On github it's the same.
last time I played with it, the memory consumption seems similar to chrome when all is loaded and running.
I remember using Dillo on my iPAQ around 2002/2003 on Familiar Linux.
Wow, this is something. I recall (decades ago, so who knows how accurate) running Dillo under Enlightenment DR17 on a low-spec Pentium (perhaps) in the old era. Glad to see it's still kicking. The computer was too slow for the rest of the software of the era but Dillo was still fast!
I was very proud that I could call our home phone line and it would boot the computer if it was off. Most pointless feature ever, but I thought I was hot shit when I was a kid getting that to work.
How does Dillo compare to WebKit?
Maintainer here.
We are currently in the process of moving Dillo away from GitHub:
- New website (nginx): https://dillo-browser.org/
- Repositories (C, cgit): https://git.dillo-browser.org/
- Bug tracker (C, buggy): https://bug.dillo-browser.org/
They should survive HN hug.
The CI runs on git hooks and outputs the logs to the web (private for now).
All services are very simple and work without JS, so Dillo can be developed fully within Dillo itself.
During this testing period I will continue to sync the GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived.
See also:
- https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046
- https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097