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Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

dillo-browser.github.io

121–130 of 179 posts

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#121
post #80
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…

Check out more lightweight web browsers: NetSurf, Pale Moon, K-Meleon on Goanna, Otter Browser, Ultralight, as well as terminal apps: Carbonyl, Browsh, Links (it has a graphical mode too).

There even was elinks that used svgalib instead of X.

So one could use it on a machine that did not even have any desktop enviroment installed.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#122
post #81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some reason Linux users never got an update to 12.18 or 12.17. Latest one was 12.16.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#123
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Mr Stallman would probably be using wget which is a GNU project, if not downloading directly from Emacs.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#124
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mr Stallman would probably be using wget which is a GNU project, if not downloading directly from Emacs.

Or just use eww from Emacs.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#125
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…

> MS Teams I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0]. I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable. I'm curious how Slack performs; perhaps they're not trying harder because there's no[t much] competition in this…

> > MS Teams

> I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0].

Teams for Linux [1] also struggles with resources. Teams in general is an absolute mess. I would go further and say that most MS products are resource intensive buggy crap.

[1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#126
post #110

After getting my own fair share of nostalgia (anyone remember running dillo on Damn Small Linux? I used to do that because all I had to run Linux in ~2003-2004 was a 486dx) and reading some of the comments, I think that Dillo could be a nice alternative to what Gemini was supposed to be. If we could agree on some kind of "low-tech web" (a subset of html, a subset of css, a subset of javascript -- or maybe no javascri…

If a 486 can do TLS with mbedtls, you might be able to run cgmnlm as the Gemini client, albeit slowly.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#127
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

Change the user agent to this one at ~/.dillo/dillorc:

      http_user_agent="Mozilla/5.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)"
Then a lot of sites will load a compatible version.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#128
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…

This is gross exageration. A fairly decent low end desktop/laptop CPU with 4GB of RAM is enough to run MS Teams, and I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#129

Fantastic work. I remember using Dillo in Puppy Linux from Live CDs back in the day. What's the minimum compiler you target? Any big long term plans? Fuzzing? Moving to 'modern' build system like CMake?

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…

> targeting a lot of platforms

Wouldn't a project such as this one be a perfect candidate for Cosmopolitan?

> Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-anywhere run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS on AMD64 and ARM64 with the best possible performance.

https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/

Re: Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

#130
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mr Stallman would probably be using wget which is a GNU project, if not downloading directly from Emacs.

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.

Source: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

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