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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

#81

Post by niutech »

bombcar wrote: post #76
heads wrote: post #65

The world of low spec hardware really does need faster, lighter browsers. Too many times now have I configured an SBC, RPi, or even a laptop that’s just a few years old and been disappointed that, while everything else is wonderful and fast and smooth looking, it is browser performance that is the one thing holding me back. I am resigned to the fact that some of my requirements really do mean I need a Ryzen 7 with 16…

It’s sad. I have clear memories of browsing the web quite capably with windows 98 and 64MB of RAM (or less!) and now we can’t even do it with gigabytes.

You can still browse the web using Opera 12.18, which takes a little memory, but the HTML5 support will be poor. The web has evolved since then.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#82

Post by lmz »

tentacleuno wrote: post #71
bluedino wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS Hah! I used an old Dell laptop that had a 1400x1050 (?) screen for this exact purpose with Dillo. I was so mad that software stopped using Windows help files...they were so much more efficient!

> I was so mad that software stopped using Windows help files Are you referring to HTML Help? I believe they rendered those with Internet Explorer; I'm willing to bet they still do for backwards compatibility.

I think they meant the Windows help files (HLP files). There seems to be a copy of the viewer here https://archive.org/details/microsoft_help_viewer_hlp

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#83

Post by niutech »

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…

Try Pale Moon, Basilisk or K-Meleon (on Goanna), which are more lightweight than Firefox. Other alternatives: Otter Browser (on Qt WebKit) or Ladybird (on LibWeb).

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#85

Post by badsectoracula »

So out of curiosity i downloaded the code from github, built it and tried it. The default site is still dillo.org which crashed the browser when it tried to visit it. Same with duckduckgo.com (crashed). Actually the crash seems to be related to some assert failure with OpenSSL as recompiling Dillo with mbedSSL lets me visit these sites.

I tried to login and reply to this thread but for some reason it wouldn't login (no error or anything, after entering my username and password and clicking login, i'd remained logged out).

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#86

Post by minitech »

astowaway wrote: post #67
minitech wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the lack of a Javascript engine makes it a very secure browser. Whenever I try to open a link that I am suspicious of, I do so in dillo. I would suggest using a Chromium or Firefox profile with JavaScript and webfonts disabled for this instead of questionably maintained C software that doesn’t have a sandbox for any of the complex and commonly exploited things it does (image decoding, HTML/CSS parsing, networ…

I would say there is a chance that there are fewer vulnerabilities in the 60k~ lines of code contained within dillo than the in the however many million lines of code it takes to do anything with firefox or chromium. running dillo in a bubblewrap container would probably be fine and not eat all of your available resources. [i got my 60k loc number from running tokei in the dillo repo, doing the same in the gecko repo…

Sure, Dillo in a sandbox is a big improvement over Dillo not in a sandbox (don’t forget an isolated X instance when you’re doing bubblewrap, ’cause FLTK 1.3 doesn’t support Wayland). I’d still feel more comfortable with mainstream browsers (and yes, they can handle many tabs on a still-small amount of memory).

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#87

Post by rodarima »

badsectoracula wrote: post #85

So out of curiosity i downloaded the code from github, built it and tried it. The default site is still dillo.org which crashed the browser when it tried to visit it. Same with duckduckgo.com (crashed). Actually the crash seems to be related to some assert failure with OpenSSL as recompiling Dillo with mbedSSL lets me visit these sites. I tried to login and reply to this thread but for some reason it wouldn't login (…

> The default site is still dillo.org which crashed the browser when it tried to visit it. Same with duckduckgo.com (crashed). Actually the crash seems to be related to some assert failure with OpenSSL as recompiling Dillo with mbedSSL lets me visit these sites.

Thanks for testing! I need to replace that with the new website. Could you open an issue on GitHub with some details of your system and OpenSSL version so I can try to reproduce it?

> I tried to login and reply to this thread but for some reason it wouldn't login (no error or anything, after entering my username and password and clicking login, i'd remained logged out).

This is likely because the cookies are disabled. See the Cookies docs:

https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/dillo3-help.html

https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/Cookies.txt

By default, Dillo has all cookies disabled. You have to either manually enable them per site (recommended) or globally:

  $ echo "news.ycombinator.com ACCEPT" >> ~/.dillo/cookies.txt
Then reload the dpi daemon to read the cookies config again:

  $ dpidc stop

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#88

Post by LikeBeans »

niutech wrote: post #84
LikeBeans wrote: post #60

You know what would be really cool? if there is a way to use it as a lightweight alternative to Electron. Is that possible?

There are better and lightweight alternatives for Electron: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38687662

Thank you for the links!

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#89

Post by rodarima »

raphlinus wrote: post #51

Sending much love. It's gratifying to see work on this continue, from seeds planted so long ago.

Thanks, raphlinus as in Raph Levien! I was just reading your bytesink document [1] from around 1997 and checking the history of gzilla, the precursor of Dillo.

[1]: https://sources.debian.org/src/gzilla/0.1.5-3/bytesink.doc/

PS: Maybe you could give us a hand contacting Jorge :-)

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#90

Post by ajot »

rodarima wrote: post #69
astowaway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there is a chance that there are fewer vulnerabilities in the 60k~ lines of code contained within dillo than the in the however many million lines of code it takes to do anything with firefox or chromium. running dillo in a bubblewrap container would probably be fine and not eat all of your available resources. [i got my 60k loc number from running tokei in the dillo repo, doing the same in the gecko repo…

I would recommend not opening suspicious pages in any browser at all. If you don't have the choice, then maybe download it with curl(1) and then inspect it with hexdump(1) or more(1), so you can see the content before sending it to an HTML parser.

Hey, nice to see you here Mr Stallman, thank you for all the hard work all these years :)
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