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Dillo: A Tiny Graphical Web Browser
- vmorgulis 11y agohttp://www.dillo.org/screenshots/index.html http://www.dillo.org/screenshots/index.html
- voltagex_ 11y ago>Bug Tracker >[currently broken]
- guard-of-terra 11y agoIt's lightning fast. Makes you feel what you've lost with all the css+js.
- smt88 11y agoBrowsing could never be slower than what we had without modern CSS/JS: desktop applications. If you think we've lost anything (speed, convenience, whatever) with CSS/JS, then you don't remember (or willfully forgot) what the web was like in the 90s.
- bananaoomarang 11y agoBut that was because we were all using dial up, now the problem is the processing power required to crunch the overly-abstracted CSS/js output of our huge and complex toolchains.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoIt's not just processing power, it's all the round-trips and timeouts and social buttons delays.
- gopowerranger 11y agoAnd advertising.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoDumb banners or text adverts would be pretty fast, but all that script-loaded, dynamically retargetted, real time bidded crap is pretty slow.
- gopowerranger 11y agoExcept dumb banner and adverts are NOT pretty fast and a frequent cause of the spinner still running long after the page loads.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoMeaning they are not dumb enough.
- gopowerranger 11y agoWithout which we wouldn't need all the processing power and 640K of memory really would be enough.
- pjc50 11y agoNo, I remember the web from the modem days, and I'd be quite happy with pages from the modem era but loaded over 100Mbit Ethernet.
- anjbe 11y agoA browser that fills a similar niche: NetSurf. http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/screenshots/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/screenshots/
- splitbrain 11y agoAnd in my limited tries Netsurf is faster and much much better at displaying modern websites (not perfect of course).
- agumonkey 11y agoWeird, I felt a huge latency gap between the two. Of course dillo renders things naively so it's almost an immediate mode, but it also regularly display things under 0.5s[1] which feels impressively good. [1] if not lower... I can't time it, but to describe it I'd say, rendering is done when the Return key is up. Seriously nice.
- jevgeni 11y agoOr just surf. http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
- Lennu 11y agoGot stable release from Ubuntu repositories with apt-get. Most of the websites work, but are visually broken. Google seems to be working okay. But the speed is super. It is like Firefox, Chrome and IE are these big slow monsters and Dillo is the little hero running around them. Dillo shows pages, other process them.
- draven 11y agoThat's their objective : http://www.dillo.org/funding/objectives.html http://www.dillo.org/funding/objectives.html It does not work for "apps", but to read documents (the initial purpose of the web), it's excellent.
- sirmac1k 11y agoMy stable from Ubuntu repositories for 15.04 just gives me segmentation fault. It's a shame that bug tracker is currently broken. Gonna try with Ubuntu devs.
- agumonkey 11y agoSomething funny, even typing a URL without suggestions felt good. The locality frees my mind. It's ""just"" a HTML renderer. Nothing else.
- cbd1984 11y agoDillo by default doesn't show pages if they're being served up using SSL: http://www.dillo.org/FAQ.html#q12 http://www.dillo.org/FAQ.html#q12 > First of all, beware that this is a prototype in alpha state. It will only provide for very basic web page retrievals, POST and GET. There is no certificate caching and NO AUTHENTICATION performed. > It's disabled by default. In my mind that's a pretty big defect.
- fractallyte 11y agoAlso don't forget Links browser with the '-g' option (text-based with graphics!). Super fast, with simple keyboard controls, or mouse if you really need to.
- cobweb 11y agoI find lynx/terminal style browsers easier to read. But one thing I did notice was that they were slower than some of the graphical ones (the last time I tried). So I ended up modding my GUI web browsers for readability. I'd like to see a speed comparison. A browser where you disable JS, CSS and images, you'd hope may be smart enough to not fetch or process unneeded assets. I have a 1.4mb connection at home, and many sites are painful to use, to the point I just don't bother. Because of lavish asset loading - with advertising etc. Most of my web reading is suspended to the future: add to queue -> process page to text -> send to e-reader, partly as it's more comfortable, and also because of sluggishness in sites/pages. On faster connections/faster computers it's less of a pain. Mobile is generally a world of pain (for me at least)!
- luxpir 11y agoDo you use custom scripts for that reading workflow, or something more generally available? Could be a nice partial solution for procrastination.
- cobweb 11y agoI didn't really want to flag a specific e-reader. And was hinting at something more general. As you say I'm sure you could bolt something together, like I have been meaning to. At the moment it's as boring as a readability bookmarklet. That then sends the parsed html to a free kindle address. Readability will accept urls to process in emails. But this doesn't work for me. I forget why. Also readability sometimes borks and I never get the page. And sometimes readability can't read something. It just comes out blank. Probably a JS heavy page or something. Managing readability archives and searching through them isn't that great. I'm not really a fan of the readability web browser interface. I haven't tried the apps. But it does the job for free so I mustn't grumble. I'd rather email/bookmark links, to process later, to then read at my leisure. And also text index them. Something to improve searching. Also the ability to rate or summarise what I've read. I get articles that upon reading, I don't like. So chaff does get through. I could do with applying feedback. Flagging bad (as in I don't like) sites, bad authors etc. One problem is that I can't do the feedback there and then from my e-reader when I'm in the moment. But actually it might be a good re-enforcment tactic to come back and evaluate later. It would be nice to then share good reads. An email address for reads is good, as you can always ask others to send you stuff. Or perhaps forward an email containing a link to your reading address. I have cognitive difficulty reading from a browser, but am fine with e-ink. Plus it doesn't require an internet connection. It's comfortable. I do tend to neglect my book reading though, which is a bit of a shame. Oh and I have a mountain of articles to read, currently about 1200. With what comes through with readability, sometimes the author is missing. Probably meta data missing. And not having dates and other meta data available can be annoying. Having a datestamp of when I bookmarked it for reading might be nice.
- zem 11y agoi used to use this as my documentation browser. it's ideal for the purpose - opens instantly, very fast and responsive, and typically html docs don't need anything fancier than dillo can handle.
- luxpir 11y agoAm I right in thinking that Dillo doesn't load any JS by default? I'd imagine your user-agent would be quite a giveaway in this case, but still, perhaps nice to use in that respect.
- estefan 11y agoOne letter away from something completely different. Anyone ever thought about renaming this? I had to look twice...
- pbhjpbhj 11y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dillo https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dillo ? Seems reasonable, not like it's called "the gimp" or something. Perhaps it's from "armadillo"?
- Raphmedia 11y agoGimp is a thing anyway, you dirty minds. http://www.gimp.org/ http://www.gimp.org/
- kzhahou 11y agoActually, it's two letters away. PilloW
- livatlantis 11y agoYou're right. I too was disappointed. AFAIK, not a single pillow has made it to the front page of HN. And we're all still waiting. They should definitely rename to avoid further confusion (not to mention the false sense of hope).
- balladeer 11y agoThis reminds me of Midori[1] which I loved using while I was on ElementaryOS[2]. It was such a refreshing change from years of using bloated Chrome and Firefox which they still are, more so. [1] http://midori-browser.org http://midori-browser.org [2] https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
- hybridtupel 11y agoWhich os do you use now? Why did you change?
- balladeer 11y agoI use OSX now. That's what I used at home for the last ~4 years. But At my work I was using Ubuntu and Windows in my last job. In current job (~5 months) I was given a Dell laptop initially on which I had set up Elementary and after some time I was given a Macbook Pro. So that's how I changed. Also, Elementary wouldn't be called stable really (and they don't claim so) - till few months ago at least, I still liked it.
- wgx 11y agoI tried a while back to get this to build for OSX but gave up after a few rabbit holes.
- fcambus 11y agoDillo is part of Pkgsrc, and can easily be installed on OS X. Bootstrap this : https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/ https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/ And then it's as easy as : pkgin install dillo
- kozukumi 11y agoI love Dillo. It reminds me of when I was ~14 back in the mid-to-late 90s and learning C++ with a copy of Visual Studio 97 my dad "got me from work". Back then things were very different and teenage me wrote a pretty nice browser from scratch with the exception of some networking code. Back then a browser was just another application on your computer, almost like a calculator something. It was just a tool. Now the web browser is probably the most complex bit of software on your computer. Crazy how far things have come in the past 20 years. Also it is great to see FLTK in use, it is a nice little toolkit albeit not the prettiest :)
- dijit 11y agoPersonally I dislike this trend, it pushes the onus of application development into the domain of web developers, and they have shoddy tools (javascript?) and have to program for multiple platforms (chrome/firefox/IE) and- at the end of the day, nobody is signing your code (not like native programs). At least we finally have a system that is multiplatform- but my web browser is seriously hungry, added to that most websites dictate how they will display their information to me- I seem to get less choice year on year. (and yes, I know I can plug my browser full of add-ons which give me back some control, but if JS doesn't run for instance, I don't even see the page in many cases, and this serves to increase how hungry the browser is)
- untog 11y agoadded to that most websites dictate how they will display their information to me Yet you say you miss native apps, which absolutely dictate everything about how they work?
- the_real_nfm 11y agoA lot of native "apps" have either very flexible configuration, or some sort of scripting/plugin framework. Maybe not iTunes, but things like foobar2000 or conky.
- 11y ago
- thom 11y agolinks -g for life.
- mosburger 11y agoAbout 10 years ago I got an old discarded, MIPS based HP workstation from work. Dillo was the only browser I could get to compile on that box's Gentoo distribution at the time, I remember it being really fast but not being able to render a lot of stuff. I'm surprised the project is still going!
- deuill 11y agoI used to help port Linux to various devices like the HP Jornada [0] or the Ben Nanonote [1], both of which have (up to) 32MB of RAM available. Finding a suitable web browser with reasonable support for "modern" web standards (basically CSS2) and a lightweight footprint was terribly hard... the better ones, as I remember them, were: 1) Dillo[2], which was one of the most lightweight graphical browsers under active development, albeit a bit light on features as well... FLTK is a great toolkit, and runs well on resource-starved devices like the ones mentioned above. 2) Netsurf[3], a relative newcomer, had one of the best rendering engines out there considering its lightweight footprint. It too is under active development, and is moving towards HTML5 and CSS3 compatibility. Has GTK2 and framebuffer backends, the last of which is better in terms of memory footprint. 3) Konqueror-Embedded[4], which hasn't seen development since the mid-2000s, was actually the only browser with reasonable support for web standards and support for Javascript. Built against QT2 (which is a massive chore in itself), it runs fast and has a low memory footprint. 4) Links-hacked[5], which again hasn't seen any development in more than 10 years, worked pretty well in graphical mode. It's a mix between elinks code (before Javascript support was gutted out) and links2 code (for the graphical parts). Some failed experiments were: Firefox version 1.0.8, last release with GTK 1.2 support, was, unfortunately, too slow to run in any reasonable way. Startup time was around 1:30 minutes on the HP Jornada, and navigating to any web-page took more than 3 minutes. Hv3[6], a browser and engine built in TCL/TK, looked promising but was a nightmare to compile and never worked correctly. Finding modern software that can run well in such memory-constrained enviroment was hard enough, let alone something as complex as a web rendering engine. [0]: https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-vargtass https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-vargtass [1]: https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-muffinman https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-muffinman [2]: http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.dillo.org/ [3]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ [4]: https://konqueror.org/embedded/ https://konqueror.org/embedded/ [5]: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/ http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/ [6]: http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html
- magic_beans 11y agoI know this is an extremely naive question, but what is the advantage to using a nonstandard browser over one of the big four?
- ausjke 11y agoUsed this way back time, but then somehow still use firefox these days. Had some javascript issues but overall it's usable.
- briankwest 11y agoYes because what we need are more browsers with less function parity.
- chris_wot 11y agoLooks like they have their own plugin framework. I've been watching the Dillo project for sometime, in 2005 I had feared it was dead, but it has been remarkably unkillable thank goodness! Their change log is quite comprehensive: http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/tip/ChangeLog http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/tip/ChangeLog Refreshingly for me, they have tried to do a lot of documentation, which can be found here: http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/devdoc http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/devdoc
- chmielewski 11y agonetsurf or uzbl over dillo any day of the week, with xxxterm receiving an honorable mention. Vim user currently using iceweasel with vimperator after trying many minimalist WebKit browsers.