https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797
Unfortunately, none of those ports made their way back to the main project. However, if there is enough interest I would be willing to merge them. I'm not very familiar with DOS/FreeDOS, so probably someone would have to help us to update the changes, but probably doable between 3.0 and 3.2.0.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/
I don't know if you saw that, but I asked a question in there I am still curious about. In the long time period that Dillo was largely idle, there were various forks.
I know of 2 that seem to be dead now...
DilloNG
https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG
D+
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/
But two others seem to be active...
Dillo-Plus
https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus
<- active as recently as September 2024, i.e. since my article.
Mobilized Dillo:
https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html
<- active last month -- and the page links to an article of mine. Nice. :-)
I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements?
FLTK is now up to 1.4.4, released in July.
https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4
Are you using the latest FLTK?
Just curious, not challenging or anything.
Thanks for the article and for including all the references.
We now adhere to https://semver.org/ as much as we can, where each of the three version numbers has a meaning, so it would be nice to include them all. I'll mention it in the next release (and probably add it to the changelog as well).
> I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements?
I'm in contact with the Mobilized Dillo developer and we exchange some patches from time to time.
> Are you using the latest FLTK?
The change from FLTK 1.3.X to 1.4.X breaks many things in Dillo. One of my priorities is to get it fixed ASAP but it will take a while. I'll probably ship experimental support for FLTK 1.4.X under a configure flag in the next 3.3.0 release so I don't delay it for too long.
Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (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.
EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
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.
The main thing we pull in from Servo (which is also shared with Firefox) is the Stylo CSS engine, which is a really fantastic piece of software (although underdocumented - a situtation I am trying to improve). I was recently able to add support for CSS transitions and animations to Blitz in ~2 days because Stylo supports most of the functionality out of the box.
(the other smaller thing we use from servo is html5ever: the html5/xhtml parser)
We also rely on large parts of the general Rust crate ecosystem: wgpu/vello for rendering (although we now have an abstraction and have added additional Skia and CPU backends), winit for windowing/input, reqwest/hyper/tokio for HTTP, icu4x for unicode, fontations/harfrust for low-level font operations, etc.
And while we're building the layout engine ourselves, we're building it as two independently usable libraries: Taffy for box-level layout (development mostly driven by Blitz but used by Zed and Bevy amongst others), and Parley for text/inline-level layout (a joint effort with the Linebender open source collective).
---
I wish that the Servo project of 2025 was interested in making more of their components available as independent libraries though. Almost all of the independently usable libraries were split out when it was still a Mozilla project. And efforts I have made to try and get Servo developers to collaborate on shared layout/text/font modules have been in vain.
If you were running it "headless" (which is supported), then it would probably work today.
There would also be the option of using Taffy and/or Parley (the layout libraries) without the rest of Blitz.
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.
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
for searching in Dillo. Once in a while you may get a captcha from DDG that is far better that any other captcha I have ever seen. The captcha is easy to use and can be a bit fun :)
Pro: as light as Dillo. Cons: You need OCaml's OMake in order to build it, but DIllo's author it's OFC aware of it and he might migrate the OMakeFile to a single Makefile.
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 GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived.
See also:
That said I wish there was something a little better than cgit
I believe that storing the issues in plain text in git repositories synced across several git servers is more robust and future-proof, but time will tell.
Having a simple storage format allows me to later on export it to any other service if I change my mind.
However I really like what you've done here for Dillo as well.
There are options here for (my setup below):
geometry=1600x900
increase font_factor=1.75
bg_color=0xFAF9F6
Start and Home pages too.
~/.dillo/ (per user directory)
dillorc is in here too and overrides /etc/dillo (the system-wide directory)
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.
Yeah, if we add JS support to Blitz then one of our initial targets will probably be "enough to run the WPT test runner".
> I was also reading how you do it in blitz
We are able to run ~20k tests (~30k subtests) from the `css` directory without JS which is IMO more than enough for it to be worthwhile.
> Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
Yes, and no. It definitely is an indicator to some extent. But in implementing floats recently I've a lot of the web suddenly renders correctly, but I'm only passing ~100 more tests!
https://git.dillo-browser.org/buggy/
It fetches the issues from GitHub and stores them in <number>/index.md in Markdown format, with some special headers. I then keep the issues in a git repository:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/
So we have a very robust storage that we can move around and also allows me to work offline. When I want to push changes, I just push them via git, then buggy(1) runs in the server via a web hook. This also tracks the edit changes.
While typing, I often use `find . -name '*.md' | entr make` which regenerates the issues that have changed into HTML as well as the index, then sends a SIGUSR1 to dillo, which reloads the issue page.
The nice thing of allowing arbitrary HTML inline is that I can write the reproducers in the issue itself:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/tree/501/index.md#n...
Closing an issue is just changing the header "State: open" by "State: closed", often with a comment pointing to the merged commit.
That's an excellent program !
https://dillo.org/post-sitemap.xml
At some point I should investigate if we can fill a complaint to get it taken down at least. Here is more info: https://dillo-browser.org/dillo.org.html
I think it is becoming more important to i386 BSD, especially since i386 OpenBSD can no longer build Firefox, Seamonkey and IIRC Chrome on i386 systems.
I have been using dillo more and more as time goes on, plus you can get plugins for Gemini Protocol and Gopher.
On C++ compilers, clang++ it's much faster than g++ under legacy platforms. Clang uses far less RAM and CPU than GCC while compiling.
I know we have no cproc/cparser or tcc for C++, but at least clang it's usable with 1GB of RAM.
If you want to compile a recent c++ compiler (gcc/clang), you must have already a c++ compiler (one of the biggest mistake in open source software ever was to move gcc to c++, clang doing the wrong thing right from the start...).
You can start to compile gcc 4.7.4, the last gcc compiler with buggy c++98 you could compile with a C compiler (you will need to patch it, and even unroll its full SDK), then you will have to compile at least 2 gccs to reach the last gcc. This insane mess is due to the infinite versions of c++ ISO "standard", introducing tons of feature creep which will force you to "upgrade" (mostly no real good reasons, namely developer tantrums, or planned obsolescence).
This is disgusting, Big Tech grade abomination of software engineering, shame on the people who did that and those in power who are not trying to fix it (probably the GCC steering committee).
And big mistakes require big fixing.
Big pimpin' on B-L-A-D’s, we doin'
Big pimpin' up in NYC
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C and B-U-N B
On cproc, cparser, I meant that we have no lightweight c++ compilers and sadly the closest to cparser in lightness it's clang++, because it's either that or the g++ behemoth.
People rants about CL being a bit 'huge', but with the introduction to the Symbolic Computation book and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming you are almost done except for a few modules from QuickLisp (CL's CPAN/PIP), such as bordeaux-threads, usockets and MCClim for an UI, which will run everywhere.
C++ templates can be far more complex than Common Lisp macros. At least with CL you have a REPL to trivially debug and inspect then. Clang and GCC just recently began to introduce * understandable* help and error messages over template parsing walls...
The last "real" C++ code I wrote was probably the modular softsynth in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams-c++.cc (see http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html for an explanation) which also compiles successfully in under 256MiB of virtual memory (¼GiB). But that's still under 500 lines of code.
I'm not sure how much RAM you need to compile G++ itself. More, I imagine. I was definitely compiling versions of GCC long before I ever saw a machine with so much RAM as 1GB, but I am guessing you probably need at least 1GiB for recent versions, maybe 4GiB.
LLVM, which is required for both clang and Rust, is much heavier. You definitely can't compile current versions of LLVM on i386, m68k, or any 32-bit platform anymore. You can get it to cross-compile to them as targets. In theory there are PPC64 machines that have enough address space to build it, but I'm not sure anyone ever made a PPC64 machine with enough physical RAM to build it in a practical span of time.
That said, it seems some people get nice results at porting from c++ to C using "AI" (LLM?).
I don't imagine you'll get much business at your hostile...
They'd probably rather go to hotels or youth hostels instead.
- It is extremely slow and resource intensive. Opening any link/page takes at least 3 seconds on my fastest computer, but the content is mostly text with images.
- It cannot be used without JS (it used to be at least readable, now only the issue description loads). I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself. There are several CLI options but those are no better than just storing the issues as files and using my editor.
- It forces users to create an account to interact and it doesn't interoperate with other forges. It is a walled garden owned by a for-profit corporation.
- You need an Internet connection to use it and a good one. Loading the main page of the dillo repo requires 3 MiB of traffic (compressed) This is more than twice the size of a release of Dillo (we use a floppy disk as limit). Loading our index of all opened issues downloads 7.6 KiB (compressed).
- Replying by email mangles the content (there is no Markdown?).
- I cannot add (built-in) dependencies across issues.
I'll probably write some post with more details when we finally consider the migration complete.
I’m glad you’re prioritizing this and that you consider this a reason to choose a different forge.
Maybe in the tech world, but in the real world there are companies such as Nestlé out there competing for this title.
Take Hyundai, a brand I drive, childhood slave factories, in the 2020s... You can't even brush your teeth without the ghosts of slavery.
I do agree that not using it is better morally, however, given the limitations of git vs fossil, which carries the issues and wiki inside the repo itself, its not a good idea to switch to another service without guarantees that its host will be forever standing, github won't die in the next decade, but the alternatives mentioned might. even google (code) got out of the source hosting business.
Of course you can't put a million users today in a service used by a thousand yesterday, but I don't buy the "non-profits don't scale" argument. If that were true, we wouldn't have Wikipedia either.
I only take an issue with "I think MS is morally reprehensible but everybody uses it so I'll keep using it too" because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people looking for code hosting will use whatever they first run into, so when you choose a host for your project you are also directly channeling users towards said host. It's your responsibility to pick a host for your projects that isn't evil by your standards, whatever those may be.
The East India trading company?
What's holding back CSS and HTML support (at their specific versions) and is there interest of expanding that support in full, but lacking resources?
I have poor eyesight, so I can’t read the content.
.main {
margin: 2em auto;
width: 50em;
}
This also causes problems, when you resize your browser window.
> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]
Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.
Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.
If remove ads and behavioural tracking, speed is faster
But goal of Big Tech, who make the popular browsers, is to make speed faster (fast enough) _with_ ads and tracking
User wants fast speed. User does not want ads and tracking. Big Tech wants users in order to target with ads and tracking. Big Tech tries top deliver fast speed to keep users interested
User can achieve fast speed _without_ ads and tracking
I do it every day. I do not use a large propular browser to make HTTP requests nor to read HTML
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.
But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look.
Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
I hope it survives another 25 years.
Using it shows how rotten the World Wide Web has become, with mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com, which I was not aware of.
I'm very much looking forward to Ladybird's first alpha release next August.
Note: DuckDuckGo still offers a perfectly usable JS-free search engine if you visit the website from a browser with no/disabled JS support. Almost all other major search engines now require JS to function.
The lack of JavaScript is an issue in terms of what sites work or even render properly, but damn everything is fast without it.
Some may consider that to be a feature
dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999]
https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png
The initial release was around the 15th of December, 1999. It's going to be 26 years ago: https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html
It's good to see that it's active again!
I've successfully run Dillo on machines with 40-64 MB of RAM before now, and it hasn't changed that much...
I was very proud that I could call our home phone line and it would boot the computer if it was off. Most pointless feature ever, but I thought I was hot shit when I was a kid getting that to work.
But an amusing follow-up is that I remember going to the Red Hat offices in Raleigh for an interview for an internship and actually describing the implementation as one of the things I'd done with a computer when I was much younger. It can't have been anything impressive because it didn't land with the interviewer. Silly naïveté of a child to think that's the kind of story you tell.
Probably all for the best in the end.
That's about it...
If a website needs javascript to be usable, this is a bad website and should be avoided.
If it is a webapp, it should provide an API so you use it using your own cli/tui/desktop/mobile client, otherwise it is a bad web app and should be avoided.
Firefox [1] and Chrome [2] use seccomp-bpf and various other Linux-specific APIs to implement their sandboxes. FreeBSD provides Capsicum [3] for this, but it's not supported by Firefox or Chrome.
Maybe Dillo could use the newer Landlock API [4] on Linux, which is being evaluated [5] for Chrome. This API seems more similar to Capsicum, so it might make it easier to support FreeBSD as well.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
[3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum
In the short term you can disable CSS or images from the menu. You can also disable specific image decoders from the configuration with the "ignore_image_formats" option.
So my question would be: does it have a good adblocker?
Make it easier for people to download this please. I clicked releases on the hoem page and i get a zip file with a whole bunch of stuff a file named Dillo.Desktop which double clicking tries to open in Gimp and then does nothing. On github it's the same.
the other good browser I was happily using on old machines is Elinks. AFAIK it's also picked up again to continue its development, although it's terminal-based.
wish endurance for the developers!
fer•3mo ago