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25 Years of Dillo

dillo-browser.github.io

81–90 of 100 posts

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of bloated? My note-taking app (with animations) binary is around 89MB[1][2]. And this is without statically linking it, using `-optimize-size` and `-ltcg` flags and running `strip` and `UXP` on it which should make it even smaller. [1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor#8-performance [2] https://get-notes.com/

I'm not OP, but 90Mb for a note taking app is incredibly bloated.

Well, it's not a simple note-taking app, it has a Block Editor like Notion, tho it's written in QML and C++ so it's very performant. Compare that to most Electron apps these days, and it has a way smaller binary size, way more performant, and uses much less RAM. I do aspire to trim its binary size down further, I just didn't put my attention on it yet.

It's always about choosing the best compromise, I just think Qt is a very good one . It allows you to target many platforms with a declarative UI (QML) and a compiled language (C++ or other bindings). It's a superb form of abstraction layer compared to web apps.

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP, but 90Mb for a note taking app is incredibly bloated.

Well, it's not a simple note-taking app, it has a Block Editor like Notion, tho it's written in QML and C++ so it's very performant. Compare that to most Electron apps these days, and it has a way smaller binary size, way more performant, and uses much less RAM. I do aspire to trim its binary size down further, I just didn't put my attention on it yet. It's always about choosing the best compromise, I just think Qt i…

I'll grant you that in a world where a chat app like Discord is >400 Mb, this is on the smaller side, but that just goes to show how low our standards have become.

But then consider for a moment that the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb installed.

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#83
post #44
post #3

I used Dillo when I ran OpenBSD on my laptop in 2003. Running a full desktop environment with text editor and web browser open: 28 MB RAM I remember that Dillo did not support automatic redirects back then. They were everywhere.

Meh - I remember full Firefox running on Gnome 2 on FreeBSD taking 64 MB in 2008. Not quite sure where we've gone so radically wrong since then.

1. Do you mean Firefox on GTK taking 64MB? Or the whole desktop environment?

2. I'd say many of seeds of radical wrongness were already planted then, but it took them a while to sprout.

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#84

I love Dillo. But I have lately been trying Dillo+ which adds some quality of life features. Have these features been incorporated into the existing Dillo? https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus

"A lightweight web browser based on Dillo but with many improvements, such as: support for http, https, gemini, gopher, epub..." https://dillo-browser.github.io

says it has plugins for gemini and gopher. What's the rationale for dillo-plus then? 8-\

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not a simple note-taking app, it has a Block Editor like Notion, tho it's written in QML and C++ so it's very performant. Compare that to most Electron apps these days, and it has a way smaller binary size, way more performant, and uses much less RAM. I do aspire to trim its binary size down further, I just didn't put my attention on it yet. It's always about choosing the best compromise, I just think Qt i…

I'll grant you that in a world where a chat app like Discord is >400 Mb, this is on the smaller side, but that just goes to show how low our standards have become. But then consider for a moment that the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb installed.

> but that just goes to show how low our standards have become

I totally agree. We need to do better. But I still stand with Qt being a good option. There are ways to lower Qt apps binary sizes down to 11MB[1] or 8.3MB[2].

[1] https://www.qt.io/blog/reducing-binary-size-of-qt-applicatio...

[2] https://www.kdab.com/qt-quick-without-a-gpu-i-mx6-ull/

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#86

I tried to use Dillo on some news websites (like bbc.co.uk or rte.ie) and they didn't render very well, which is not so much a criticism of Dillo but of the fact that even websites who main job is to display simple textual content and maybe some images have managed to complicate their UIs enough that lightweight browsers struggle to display them. A common problem seems to be pages that display different content snipp…

I honestly don't throw this phase out there lightly so please don't roll your eyes, but this would be an ideal application for AI. "See all this neatly formatted text? Yeah do your deep learning thing and make this ugly text look like this neatly formatted text. Bonus if you make all the adds look like blurry blobs but always show images that are part of the article"

I could see that working if news sites were considerate enough to ship little enough text to fit in the LLM context window. Does anybody support 10M+ tokens yet?

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#87
post #49
post #42

it can show a basic unbloated news site from my contry it can show lwn.net it can show HN it can show old popular local forum it can show rss feeds it automatically blocks (does not work on) all the popular social networks -- what else is there?

gopher and gemini plugins work great, it needs dillo mainline. Also: gopher://magical.fish Huge portal, with news sources gopher://goherddit.com Reddit gemini://gemi.dev News Waffle, able to browse Ars Technica and so over Gemini.

> gopher://goherddit.com Reddit

gopher://gopherddit.com

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't throw this phase out there lightly so please don't roll your eyes, but this would be an ideal application for AI. "See all this neatly formatted text? Yeah do your deep learning thing and make this ugly text look like this neatly formatted text. Bonus if you make all the adds look like blurry blobs but always show images that are part of the article"

I could see that working if news sites were considerate enough to ship little enough text to fit in the LLM context window. Does anybody support 10M+ tokens yet?

I didn't mean it as a "Hey GPT: format the following text neatly", rather it could learn to produce a static program that takes ugly looking pages and formats them to look professionally published. It wouldn't really be operating on text, but instead changing font size, column width, and other css type variables.

Re: 25 Years of Dillo

#89
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see that working if news sites were considerate enough to ship little enough text to fit in the LLM context window. Does anybody support 10M+ tokens yet?

I didn't mean it as a "Hey GPT: format the following text neatly", rather it could learn to produce a static program that takes ugly looking pages and formats them to look professionally published. It wouldn't really be operating on text, but instead changing font size, column width, and other css type variables.

That latter thing is a much harder cat and mouse game though. Is the proposal to use the rendered output as feedback to help the LLM converge faster than the people already making de-shittified UIs? If you can't use the actual content of the page to assist the AI then that seems like a very hard problem.
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