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Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser
Hi, in mid 2022 the host dillo.org expired [0], taking down the website, mercurial repo, the mailing list and the email server used to reach the core developers of Dillo. Someone bought it and now serves a weird clone of the original page with missing content.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32448104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32448104
I felt sad as I didn't want it to die, so I got a copy of the repo from my hard disk, uploaded it to GitHub and decided to do some maintenance on the code to at least keep the build working. After some time, the folks at Atari Forum decided to use my repo to port it to the Atari platform and they managed to do it [1].
[1]: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues/34 https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues/34
That gave me some motivation to work a bit more on the project to prevent it from dying. So I created an organization under the name of "dillo-browser" and made a new webpage [2] with a backup of the old one.
[2]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/ https://dillo-browser.github.io/
With the help of Andreas Kemnade which had access to the original server, we managed to backup most of the stuff from the original website (including non-reachable pages) which I uploaded to the Archive.
In the meanwhile, I combined the support for both OpenSSL (1.1 and 3) and mbedTLS (2 and 3) as well as proper CI with rendering tests. We now build Dillo for Ubuntu, FreeBSD and macOS!
I also became familiar with the plugin mechanism in Dillo, which allows any program that uses the standard input and output to become a plugin registered to a given protocol (like file://...). I did a simple one (which is just a bash script) to read local manual pages which is handy to follow links to other pages [3], but check also the ones Charles E. Lehner did which are more advanced [4].
[3]: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man
[4]: https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/WGEMg7AXN4o/ https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/WGEMg7AXN4o/
As of today, I'm unable to contact the main developer, Jorge Arellano Cid, which has not interacted with the mailing list for some years now. Jorge, if you read this, please contact with me (you can find my email in the git commits).
Regarding the future of Dillo, I'm planning to (finally) do the 3.1 release after some testing, and for that it would be convenient to have the help of some users to get some feedback ;-)
If you want to contribute, feel free to open a PR or send a patch (via GitHub or by email, I don't care). Check also the current issues and pull requests to see what is pending or already being working on. I will probably setup a mailing list at some point too.
Thanks!
Rodrigo.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dannyobrien 3y agoThank you for doing this! Loved Dillo, back in the day
- natas 3y agohuge huge thanks, I still use Dillo!
- johnklos 3y agoVery nice! Dillo is handy to have on lower specced machines. I've used it on m68k. I really should see why it doesn't compile on VAX, though... Thanks!
- nu11ptr 3y agoHow does this do at rendering modern websites?
- chx 3y agopoorly it doesn't even pass acid2 see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126
- rodarima 3y agoGenerally 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.
- krylon 3y agoI 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 parts of the world wide web inaccessible.