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Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

dillo-browser.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#21

Post by janice1999 »

dfox wrote: post #17
rodarima wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! > What's the minimum compiler you target? I didn't defined any (yet), but shouldn't be too hard to add to the CI. > Any big long term plans? First preventing it from dying and getting removed from distros. Then it depends of how much free time I can dedicate to it, but at least maintaining it. > Fuzzing? I would say first adding some of the other browser tests suites. That should catch a lot of rendering issu…

I would suggest switching to Meson instead of CMake.

How well does Meson handle complex cross-platform projects nowadays with multiple compilers? My team tried Meson about ~3yrs ago for an embedded system. We ended up moving to CMake instead after struggling to use it for armclang.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#22

Post by krylon »

rodarima wrote: post #11
nu11ptr wrote: post #6

How does this do at rendering modern websites?

Generally not great, as Dillo doesn't support Javascript and most modern sites are using it to create content. But if the site degrades well without JS it should render reasonably well.

I often use it to read Wikipedia articles. The layout is all jambled up, but the article content itself is fine. If a web site is low on layout, heavy on text, it usually works okay-ish. A lot of web sites these days, however, are an empty skeleton with a bit of Javascript code to load the content - these do not work in dillo, it has no Javascript engine; to a degree, I consider this a feature, but it makes large parts of the world wide web inaccessible.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#24

Post by rodarima »

sheepscreek wrote: post #20

Hypothetically, could JavaScript support be added by using a lightweight engine, such as QuickJS?

Yes and it has been discussed in the mailing list before [1].

[1]: https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/search?q=javascript

However, I don't think the machines that Dillo is targeting would benefit from adding support for it and it would increase a lot the surface for security problems. Maybe my advise would be to use another browser if you have the computing power to run JS.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#25

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Yes! Dillo enthuthiast here to say thanks and good luck.

What’s your approach to browser dev? Do you prefer to go wide or deep, for example the Ladybird project goes “deep” in that they choose an endpoint and try to get everything on the page working and whatnot. Maybe I’m rambling, but very cool!

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#27

Post by linkpuff »

Nice to know Dillo still gets some love! I've got a lot of dillo plugins stored up that I managed to get from scuttlebutt a while ago(dillo-adb, dillo-dat, dillo-finger, dillo-git, dillo-gopher, dillo-gemini, dillo-ipfs, dillo-ssb and dillo-ytdl), and if you're interested I can zip them up and send it to you to be forked and worked on the project

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#28

Post by rodarima »

krylon wrote: post #19

Given the circumstances, I am happy to read this. I own two ~2009 netbooks with Intel Atom N270 CPUs and 1GB of RAM each - running Firefox on those is ridiculous, whereas dillo will run very well on these. I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS - having 20 to 40 tabs open would gobble up a lot of RAM in Firefox, whereas dillo happily stayed around 100MB no…

> I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS - having 20 to 40 tabs open would gobble up a lot of RAM in Firefox, whereas dillo happily stayed around 100MB no matter what I threw at it. My current desktop has enough RAM this not a concern any more, but I have fond memories of using dillo on memory-deficient machines and am a current user still.

This is precisely the objective Jorge had in mind, so people on other parts of the world with less capable machines where still able to access the web.

While I was in university, I was using an old Pentium 4 at home (which I still use) which couldn't open a single tab unless you wait around 30 seconds for it to load. So I was mostly using Dillo and failing back to Google cache and then Firefox to read something that required Javascript.

I used it for years and it always was super fast. Also, my network connection was not very fast, so loading only the HTML helped a lot.

> So thanks to everyone who continues to work on this, I really appreciate the work you do! Dillo is a fine piece of software that I have enjoyed using for at least 15 years now, and I hope it will be around for many years to come! Thanks :-)

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#30

Post by rodarima »

linkpuff wrote: post #27

Nice to know Dillo still gets some love! I've got a lot of dillo plugins stored up that I managed to get from scuttlebutt a while ago(dillo-adb, dillo-dat, dillo-finger, dillo-git, dillo-gopher, dillo-gemini, dillo-ipfs, dillo-ssb and dillo-ytdl), and if you're interested I can zip them up and send it to you to be forked and worked on the project

I think most of them are from Charles, and he maintains a scuttlebutt-web interface, so you can download them from the homepage:

https://celehner.com/projects.html#dillo-plugins

I already talked with him about keeping a copy of them in GitHub under the dillo-browser organization.

> and if you're interested I can zip them up and send it to you to be forked and worked on the project

Feel free to open an issue and upload it there, so we can keep a copy of the zip. Thanks!

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