3 ms·

Hypothetically, could JavaScript support be added by using a lightweight engine, such as QuickJS?

rodarima 3y ago
Yes and it has been discussed in the mailing list before [1]. [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/search?q=javascript https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/search?q=javascript However, I don't think the machines that Dillo is targeting would benefit from adding support for it and it would increase a lot the surface for security problems. Maybe my advise would be to use another browser if you have the computing power to run JS.
- cxr 3y ago
  > I don't think the machines that Dillo is targeting would benefit from adding support for it People tend to overestimate the resources required to run JS and have a miscalibrated sense of how slow they can/should expect it to be. Firefox 1.x and 2.0 worked on machines with substantially worse specs than many of the ones that people are mentioning here (think: sub-GHz PIIIs with 128–256 MB of RAM), and substantial parts of Firefox itself are written in JS. I haven't checked, but I'd bet that 2024-era QuickJS is also faster than 2004-era SpiderMonkey at executing the same script.
  - wakeupcall 3y ago
    I was running FF (and netscape before that) on such machines, and they were about the worst possible program to run. My memory of browsers of the era was slow, buggy, and bloated. It was barely usable because the connection speed was by far the biggest bottleneck. I was using dillo heavily at the time, when we didn't mind differences in rendering. After that I switched to konqueror. As the dhtml/js craze exploded, I caved in to ff when more often than not the websites didn't load or work as expected.
vitiral 3y ago
Probably but my guess based on the state of the web is that this a rabbit hole without end
tentacleuno 3y ago
If my (somewhat distant) understanding is correct, Dillo doesn't employ sandboxing like the other browsers. If this is the case, then adding support for JavaScript would be disastrous -- there are reasons why modern browsers use things like setuid, seccomp bpf, etc. etc.

Yes and it has been discussed in the mailing list before [1]. [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/search?q=javascript https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/search?q=javascript However, I don't think the machines that Dillo is targeting would benefit from adding support for it and it would increase a lot the surface for security problems. Maybe my advise would be to use another browser if you have the computing power to run JS.

cxr 3y ago
> I don't think the machines that Dillo is targeting would benefit from adding support for it People tend to overestimate the resources required to run JS and have a miscalibrated sense of how slow they can/should expect it to be. Firefox 1.x and 2.0 worked on machines with substantially worse specs than many of the ones that people are mentioning here (think: sub-GHz PIIIs with 128–256 MB of RAM), and substantial parts of Firefox itself are written in JS. I haven't checked, but I'd bet that 2024-era QuickJS is also faster than 2004-era SpiderMonkey at executing the same script.
- wakeupcall 3y ago
  I was running FF (and netscape before that) on such machines, and they were about the worst possible program to run. My memory of browsers of the era was slow, buggy, and bloated. It was barely usable because the connection speed was by far the biggest bottleneck. I was using dillo heavily at the time, when we didn't mind differences in rendering. After that I switched to konqueror. As the dhtml/js craze exploded, I caved in to ff when more often than not the websites didn't load or work as expected.

vitiral 3y ago

Probably but my guess based on the state of the web is that this a rabbit hole without end

tentacleuno 3y ago

If my (somewhat distant) understanding is correct, Dillo doesn't employ sandboxing like the other browsers. If this is the case, then adding support for JavaScript would be disastrous -- there are reasons why modern browsers use things like setuid, seccomp bpf, etc. etc.