Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats [0] (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.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos").
There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
Edit: to be clear, I consider this a good thing. You've got a head start, are contributing to the ecosystem and aren't doing by yourself something that others have spent billions on.
IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.
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...
Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices.
I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
Incidentally, DDG still works without JS.
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 git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived.
See also:
Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
I did some experiments to pass some tests from WPT, but many of them require JS to perform the check (I was also reading how you do it in blitz). It would probably be the best way forward, so it indicates what is actually supported.
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 hope it survives another 25 years.
fer•1h ago