5 ms·
Given the circumstances, I am happy to read this. I own two ~2009 netbooks with Intel Atom N270 CPUs and 1GB of RAM each - running Firefox on those is ridiculou
by krylon 3y ago
Given the circumstances, I am happy to read this. I own two ~2009 netbooks with Intel Atom N270 CPUs and 1GB of RAM each - running Firefox on those is ridiculous, whereas dillo will run very well on these.
I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS - having 20 to 40 tabs open would gobble up a lot of RAM in Firefox, whereas dillo happily stayed around 100MB no matter what I threw at it. My current desktop has enough RAM this not a concern any more, but I have fond memories of using dillo on memory-deficient machines and am a current user still.
Also, the lack of a Javascript engine makes it a very secure browser. Whenever I try to open a link that I am suspicious of, I do so in dillo.
So thanks to everyone who continues to work on this, I really appreciate the work you do! Dillo is a fine piece of software that I have enjoyed using for at least 15 years now, and I hope it will be around for many years to come! <3
- rodarima 3y ago> I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS - having 20 to 40 tabs open would gobble up a lot of RAM in Firefox, whereas dillo happily stayed around 100MB no matter what I threw at it. My current desktop has enough RAM this not a concern any more, but I have fond memories of using dillo on memory-deficient machines and am a current user still. This is precisely the objective Jorge had in mind, so people on other parts of the world with less capable machines where still able to access the web. While I was in university, I was using an old Pentium 4 at home (which I still use) which couldn't open a single tab unless you wait around 30 seconds for it to load. So I was mostly using Dillo and failing back to Google cache and then Firefox to read something that required Javascript. I used it for years and it always was super fast. Also, my network connection was not very fast, so loading only the HTML helped a lot. > So thanks to everyone who continues to work on this, I really appreciate the work you do! Dillo is a fine piece of software that I have enjoyed using for at least 15 years now, and I hope it will be around for many years to come! <3 Thanks :-)
- bluedino 3y ago>> I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS Hah! I used an old Dell laptop that had a 1400x1050 (?) screen for this exact purpose with Dillo. I was so mad that software stopped using Windows help files...they were so much more efficient!
- tentacleuno 3y ago> I was so mad that software stopped using Windows help files Are you referring to HTML Help? I believe they rendered those with Internet Explorer; I'm willing to bet they still do for backwards compatibility.
- lmz 3y agoI think they meant the Windows help files (HLP files). There seems to be a copy of the viewer here https://archive.org/details/microsoft_help_viewer_hlp https://archive.org/details/microsoft_help_viewer_hlp
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI also like dillo, but just as an option - have you tried netsurf as well? Likewise very lightweight.
- nmz 3y agodillo is more lightweight, although it doesn't support html5, while netsurf does support some html5. The website itself of dillo does not render the same in dillo.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoSure; I personally view it as a continuum of lynx..elinks..dillo..netsurf..........firefox is so. Just pointing out that netsurf is close to dillo.
- krylon 3y agoI have. I only discovered it about two weeks ago, though. But so far, I do like it. Thank you!
- minitech 3y ago> Also, the lack of a Javascript engine makes it a very secure browser. Whenever I try to open a link that I am suspicious of, I do so in dillo. I would suggest using a Chromium or Firefox profile with JavaScript and webfonts disabled for this instead of questionably maintained C software that doesn’t have a sandbox for any of the complex and commonly exploited things it does (image decoding, HTML/CSS parsing, network protocols, local file access).
- astowaway 3y agoI would say there is a chance that there are fewer vulnerabilities in the 60k~ lines of code contained within dillo than the in the however many million lines of code it takes to do anything with firefox or chromium. running dillo in a bubblewrap container would probably be fine and not eat all of your available resources. [i got my 60k loc number from running tokei in the dillo repo, doing the same in the gecko repo took multiple minutes and pegged 8 cores at 100%, might be a bug in tokei or maybe 21 million lines of code is just enormous]
- rodarima 3y agoI would recommend not opening suspicious pages in any browser at all. If you don't have the choice, then maybe download it with curl(1) and then inspect it with hexdump(1) or more(1), so you can see the content before sending it to an HTML parser.
- niutech 3y agoTry Pale Moon, Basilisk or K-Meleon (on Goanna), which are more lightweight than Firefox. Other alternatives: Otter Browser (on Qt WebKit) or Ladybird (on LibWeb).
- barbs 3y agoWhich OS are you running on your netbooks? I recently acquired an old netbook with an Intel Atom processor and have been trying to find decent lightweight yet usable OS for it. I'd tried Debian but Firefox was too slow on it, maybe I should try again with Dillo now?
- nicman23 3y agofirefox with umatrix probably will be better for that hardware.
- anthk 3y agoZramup script: #!/bin/sh doas /sbin/modprobe zram doas /sbin/zramctl --find --size 1024M doas /sbin/mkswap /dev/zram0 doas /sbin/swapon /dev/zram0 --priority -1 Not Firefox, but Luakit might do it fine on single pages where JS is mandatory, such as, sadly, my country's goverment pages to do personal life related tasks.