7 ms·
Show HN: Dillo 3.1.0 released after 9 years
As commented before[1], I've been working on the past months to get the Dillo
back to life and today I'm happy to release the 3.1.0 version, after almost 9
years since the last one.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
During this time:
- A new mailing list was created[2] which is beginning to get
some messages and patches. It is available in gmane via NNTP at
gmane.comp.web.dillo.devel.
[2]: https://lists.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/dillo-dev@mailman3.com/ https://lists.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/dillo-dev@mailman...
- A LiberaPay page[3] which received the first donations (thanks!).
[3]: https://liberapay.com/dillo/ https://liberapay.com/dillo/
- Some more bugs where fixed and new features where added (details in the
release page and/or changelog).
Thanks to all the people that contributed with patches and tests. Now let's see
if we can make it land in some distros!
- vouaobrasil 2y agoI love these minimal browsers. Much better than the modern-style web for sure.
- ptek 2y agough tell me about it. Especially with all the frame works added :(. And the CSS wizards who remove the underline on the link, so when I'm helping people over the phone they can't find the link :'-( And the damn trackers :(
- thriftwy 2y agoDillo just shows how fast the web without css, js and fonts is. It loads before you even lift your finger from the keyboard.
- anthk 2y agoDillo supports a minimal amount of CSS. The issue it's mainly JS.
- kristopolous 2y agoIt'd be interesting to make a "less ambitious" JS in the same way that embedded chips have these less ambitious "dialects" of c and c++. Like a js-mini that doesn't have the bells and whistles like opengl, bluetooth and midi support
- cxr 2y agoThat's a category error. JS is a programming language. All the bells and whistles you mention are part of Web platform machinery with APIs through JS-level bindings accessible to programs written by website authors. The language/dialect has little to do with it; you're envisioning a different stack that would require a new browser engine, not a language.
- anthk 2y agoIt exists, Duktape and Quickjs, but even on bigger browsers the support it's subpar. Shockingly, edbrowse parses JS pages well enough to login and post in some sites.
- baq 2y agoDitch js altogether and just provide a minimal WASM interpreter. A dillo-compatible page could then ship with a js runtime as a shim.
- agumonkey 2y ago20 tabs for less than 1MB of RAM. At one point I used it for programming docs browsing.
- cxr 2y agoPeople working on developer docs would do well to make them work well in terminal-based browsers, too. This should be the norm.
- anthk 2y agoThe coverage on CJK fonts it's still bad, even on supported fonts. Also, a tip: <audio> and <video> tags should be able to be redirected into a media player, or xdg-open.
- rodarima 2y agoThere are a lot of features waiting to be included in Dillo. We focused on solving bugs first and tried to get as few features as posible to get the 3.1.0 out as soon as posible. Apart from CJK, there are other issues with fonts that we have to solve too. Feel free to open more issues: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues
- goosedragons 2y agoBrings back memories. I used to use Dillo on Damn Small Linux on my hand me down laptop with 32MB RAM which even then was a pitiful amount for web browsing.
- rodarima 2y agoCheck out the gallery: https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/index.html https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/index.html
- anthk 2y agoDillo is my daily browser among Links under an N270 netbook. I might submit a photo with the device running Dillo.
- idatum 2y agoYes, same -- for me a '98 Toshiba laptop running NetBSD. Nicer to use compared to lynx but not bloatware.
- oblio 2y agoI've never browsed on anything faster than Links with image support and JS support. Before CSS took of it was stil usable and web pages loaded INSTANTLY. I don't I'll ever see anything like it again, despite 10-100x the computing power and 10-100x the bandwidth increases.
- krylon 2y agoThank you very much!!!
- rogeliodh 2y agobtw, "Dillo is a fast and small graphical web browser"
- riffic 2y ago[flagged]
- rodarima 2y agoBy the way, there is a CSS bug in HackerNews that we discovered today[1] that is causing most of the rules to be wrongly parsed. I'm not sure if hn@ycombinator.com is the proper place to report it. https://lists.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/dillo-dev@mailman3.com/message/MXAQDMZFGBNQLPEALQQZW5W4RR4LR27T/ https://lists.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/dillo-dev@mailman... Here is the bad rule: input[type=\"submit\"] { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; }
- philipkglass 2y agoYes, email hn@ycombinator.com. Dang is very responsive.
- dang 2y agoShould be fixed now. Thanks!
- rodarima 2y agoThanks!
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago5 minute bugfix, on a Saturday no less. Incredible
- Sabinus 2y agoDang is a treasure.
- ptx 2y agoAnd another HN bug, I think: Comments are wrapped in "span" elements (which are inline elements) but contain "p" elements (block elements) which is not valid: <span class="commtext c00">...<p>...<p>...</span> The W3C HTML validator says: "Element p not allowed as child of element span in this context." This causes Dillo to render the text in grey from the second paragraph on.
- hanniabu 2y agoscreenshots?
- iamthejuan 2y agoChuck Home.
- iamthejuan 2y agoClick Home.
- rodarima 2y agoIn the main page: https://dillo-browser.github.io/ https://dillo-browser.github.io/ And here are more: https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/index.html https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/index.html
- floxy 2y agoAnyone ever compile a browser with emscripten to wasm? So that you could try out a new browser without having to download and install it? I think that could be genuinely useful in instances like this (try-before-you-buy-browser-in-your-browser), instead of just a recursive curiosity.
- littlestymaar 2y agoPlease bring a new step of “The birth and death of JavaScript” [1] to the real world (but still not the nuclear war part of it, thanks). [1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- rodarima 2y agoThis was already asked the last time[1], but I think it would miss the point of Dillo. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853053
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoIn some ways it would miss the main use of dillo, but at the same time if you were going to embed a browser like that surely dillo is a great option precisely because of how light it is.
- bmacho 2y agoYou probably can't try out a browser in the browser, because of the CORS rules.
- crznp 2y agoYou could if the host domain acted as a VPN/proxy
- genewitch 2y agothe cloudpilotemu project can use this host browser as a proxy thing so you can sync your emulated (in the browser) to your PC as well as give the emulator internet access, likely one way to have a browser in a browser. I didn't try it out, though, i just read it in the documentation.
- h4sh 2y agothe best dillo experience on macos is probably with https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus/ https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus/ ( I couldn't get dillo to compile easily on macos, it doesn't seem to detect ssl libraries installed on the system) you can do this to compile it on macos (tested on M1): install https://www.xquartz.org/ https://www.xquartz.org/ to have X11 brew install fltk libjpeg #you might also need openssl@3 but unsure git clone https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus/ https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus/; cd dillo-plus # update the 1.3.8_1 fltk version sed 's/1.3.8_1/1.3.9/g' Makefile.options.MacOS > Makefile.options make -j8 # find binary in ./src/dillo maybe someone should make a brew package (for both this and dillo-plus)..?
- LAC-Tech 2y agoReally cool. Will grab it when it hits the arch repos. Might make a comfy set up where I bookmark some low resource websites and use dillo to browse them. Fond memories from tiny linux distros that ran entirely in a few MB of ram using dillo.
- rodarima 2y agoIt is orphan in Arch, but I will check tomorrow if I can apply for maintainer. In the meanwhile I have the AUR package[1] dillo-git: [1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dillo-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dillo-git
- rodarima 2y agoIt is on the Arch Linux repository now :-) # pacman -Syu dillo
- marttt 2y agoI think it is still the default browser for Tiny Core Linux.
- rodarima 2y agoForgot to mention that we are also on Fedi: https://fosstodon.org/@dillo https://fosstodon.org/@dillo Here are some cherry picks: - Dillo on the Kindle: https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/112181258739093008 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/112181258739093008 - Dillo on an old Samsung phone: https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/112327798958777998 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/112327798958777998
- mikae1 2y agoStupid (and unthankful) question perhaps, but have you considered working on https://ladybird.dev https://ladybird.dev instead? Kling and the small team seem to be making great progress.
- rodarima 2y agoAFAIK, Ladybird goal is to build an independent web browser from scratch that can render the "modern" web. Dillo original goal[1] is to provide access to the web to places with very bad internet speed or latency as well as old or resource constrained computers. [1]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/interview.html https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/interview.html I don't think we will ever implement JS support, as that would increase a lot the minimum requirements to run Dillo and make the attack surface on the browser much bigger.
- mikae1 2y agoOK, thanks for clarifying the goal.
- niutech 2y agoRather than joining Ladybird, it would be great to see a merge of Netsurf and Dillo as a very lightweight alternative to Blink/Webkit/Gecko/Goanna-based browsers. For low bandwidth or slow computers, also try Carbonyl Terminal (https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal).
- 2y ago
- kome 2y agoI loved Dillo! great to see new activity
- 627467 2y agoTIL of Spartan Protocol. I love Dillon, how is it handling modern security features like new versions of TLS or SSL?
- rodarima 2y ago> TIL of Spartan Protocol You can browse spartan pages with a Dillo plugin[1], as well as Gopher, Gemini and others. [1]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins > how is it handling modern security features like new versions of TLS or SSL We support OpenSSL 1.1 and 3 (and any other API-compatible), LibreSSL and mbedTLS 2 and 3. You can choose the one you like/trust more at link time.
- Whitespace 2y agoIt's in the changelog summary: > Add support for OpenSSL, LibreSSL and mbed TLS for HTTPS, which is now enabled by default.
- Palomides 2y agohow does dillo compare with netsurf? I've been considering porting netsurf to an unusual platform, but if dillo has substantially better handling of modern pages, I might use it instead
- rodarima 2y agoWhat prevents you from doing some tests? We have seen Dillo running in a lot of old and not very common machines (Atari), so you may have some work already done.
- Palomides 2y agonothing! I look forward to testing it out, just haven't had the time yet
- SahAssar 2y agoAre you also considering ladybird?
- marttt 2y agoI think Netsurf renders pages closer to what they "should" look like in a mainstream browser. However, a huge bonus for Dillo is that it is really easy to switch off CSS, images, etc if the page doesn't look "good", and only render the text (IMO this is also very much encouraged by the UI). I recall having some rendering annoyances with Netsurf, but this was at least 5 years ago.
- cxr 2y agoFrom <https://dillo-browser.github.io/dillo.org.html https://dillo-browser.github.io/dillo.org.html> > we have setup a new website based on GitHub pages (so hopefully it won't dissapear soon) Why cede control of your namespace to GitHub, though? You can host stuff on GitHub Pages without having to go through github.io to get there. Just grab another (cheap) domain and set up a CNAME record to point to GitHub Pages.
- rodarima 2y agoBecause I considered it a good starting point as I can place a redirect notice there if we move to another place, without worrying we will lose the DNS again. If you want to help, feel free to do so :-)
- cxr 2y agodilloproject.org This cost me $17.32 for two years—so this time next year, even if there's not $11 or whatever available, there'll be a whole other year to come up with it. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (which this isn't using right now; it's just on a free static host) allows anyone to deposit funds into an account for sites hosted there, not just the person behind the site, which means it can in theory stay up indefinitely, even if the person in charge is incapacitated and/or stops putting their own money into it (so long as they don't actively take an interest against its continued operation).
- fn-mote 2y ago> Just grab another (cheap) domain The post explains how they lost their long-held domain name. At least GitHub won't dry up and blow away if you miss a payment. They're all cheap at the start... and do not necessarily stay that way. The very end of the post makes it clear this is a temporary situation.
- cxr 2y agowat They didn't lose dillo.org because it suddenly became not cheap. They didn't "lose" it at all—they were never in control of it. The post explains that it lapsed because whoever had it didn't renew, and it wouldn't matter much, because the person who was in charge is no longer involved with Dillo, anyway, which would have made dillo.org a true zombie site. > The very end of the post makes it clear this is a temporary situation There's no such thing when it comes to namespaces. Which is my whole point. If they had grabbed dilloproject.org (or whatever) today, they could continue using that no matter where they're actually hosting the pages in the future. Once you're in somebody else's namespace, though, the only thing you can do is abandon it after adopting a new one and hope that a redirect suffices.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- riffic 2y agoAgain I love how posts like these have no context what a Dillo is. While it's not hard to find that info out on my own, it could have also been done by the poster. kudos on shipping code I guess.
- bckr 2y agoYou could have used this comment to tell us what it is. It’s a minimalistic web browser that works on low powered machines https://dillo.org/ https://dillo.org/
- rodarima 2y agoTLDR: Dillo is a fast and small graphical web browser. It kind of died in 2017 and this is the first release after 9 years from the last one. You can read the main website for more details[1]. [1]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/ https://dillo-browser.github.io/ And the release page[2], which explains a bit of the history of the project and the current state. [2]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/latest.html https://dillo-browser.github.io/latest.html
- zem 2y agoawesome work! dillo used to be my standard documentation browser when projects started using html for their docs, it was snappy and opened files almost instantly
- rodarima 2y agoYou may like this plugin[1] to read local man pages as properly formated HTML pages. [1]: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man More plugins: https://dillo-browser.github.io/index.html#plugins https://dillo-browser.github.io/index.html#plugins
- zem 2y agonice :) thanks for the pointer
- anthk 2y agoThe gopher one it's broken upon using a URL with no selector: gopher://sdf.org for instance. it defaults to a 0 one so it doesn't show up right, you need to state gopher://sdf.org/1/ by hand. Otherwise, it works great. On the man plugin, for the users with mandoc/mdoc, I found a bug, '-T html' should be '-Thtml' without spaces. Then works fine.
- throwaway984393 2y agoI can still vaguely remember when the web was mostly just HTML, images, css, and the occasional plugin content like Flash, Java, and RealPlayer. You could really do a lot of stuff in a tiny package. Now you have to run a pseudo-operating system to deliver bizarre bloated applications via text. Technology didn't used to make me sad... I once shipped Dillo in a tiny memory resident distro, it was fantastic. Happy to see its return.
- marttt 2y agoMade my day, massive thanks! Dillo must be my all time favorite browser by far. Responsiveness, modular UI and excellent config file -- everything about it is pure joy, really.
- sylware 2y agoIf you are interested in dillo, have a look at netsurf, another css renderer, but this one has the big advantage to require only a plain an simple C compiler, not a gigantically complex c++ compiler. That said, more noscript/basic (x)html browsers, the better, even written with computer languages with an extremely complex syntax (rust/java/etc).
- anthk 2y agoUnless Netsurf compiles with TinyCC, cparser or cproc, sadly both gcc and clang are bloated.
- sylware 2y agoI did a plain and simple C port of bzip2 busybox code for plain and simple C compilers: on bzip2 compression, tinycc is really slow, ~2 times slower than gcc (13.2 -O2)... but cproc/qbe gets... ~70-80% of gcc speed. Switching to cproc/qbe would clearly be a win for a lean open source stack (which de-facto excludes c++ and similar ultra-complex syntax computer languages). In my project list: a minimal linux kernel with gcc-cleaned C code.
- ptek 2y agoThanks. Will try this on NetBSD :)
- jmclnx 2y agome too :) actually NetBSD is where I use Dillo the most! Congratulations to the Dillo Team. And https://daemonforums.org/ https://daemonforums.org/ works great with dillo, with dillo you can even log into daemonforums. The ID ywill not be saved, but AFAIK no other forum allows login when in dillo.
- rodarima 2y agoThanks! You should be able to login most forums that don't require JS. Keep an eye on the cookies configuration[1] which are disabled by default. [1]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/user_help.html#cookies https://dillo-browser.github.io/user_help.html#cookies
- khimaros 2y agois there a document or code reference that describes the subset of HTML/JS/CSS which is supported by dillo? i've seen a number of people wishing for realistically achievable "HTML-lite" that could be targeted as an alternative to separate protocols like Gemini and dillo's baseline feels like it would be a good starting point.
- forgotmypw17 2y agoYes! Thank you so much. I love this browser, and I'm really grateful to you for maintaining it. I test my websites with Dillo diligently, so I have some re-testing to do now. :)
- cookiengineer 2y agoDo you test the engine against acid3? I think what we need would also be something like acid4 as a test suite, because CSS4 with its flow-root rework is kinda hard to implement for browser engines from the CSS2.1 age. Basically everything has been changed when it comes to the parser's grammar and lexical approach. Things like nested conditions in CSS through media queries or supports queries are impossible to implement without rewriting the parser from scratch. Do you plan on implementing all the event/media/supports related stuff from an isolated CSS perspective, including pointer events, transitions and animations? Because having the @supports queries unified across the board would help a lot supporting older browsers without animations or without a tweening engine.
- zamadatix 2y agoThings like WPT (Web Platform Tests) and Test262 have largely replaced the old Acid test line, albeit they aren't as flashy/fun/user friendly so they don't have as much public attention as the Acid tests did.
- niutech 2y ago2024 is a breakthrough year - first Netsurf 3.11 released after many years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38804205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38804205), Servo picked up from the dust, Ladybird getting better every month and now Dillo 3.1 resurrected after 9 years!
- ptx 2y agoI wonder if we'll see a revival of Grail [0], Guido van Rossum's browser from the the late 90s with support for Python-based applets. :) His draft paper [1] from 1996 mentions some limitations due to lack of support for threading, which is no longer an issue. And maybe the JIT that's currently being worked on will help with the "rather grim image of performance". On the other hand, the restricted execution mode in Python that Grail relies on has long since been removed (much like Java's corresponding features). Maybe OS-level sandboxing features (e.g. Capsicum, pledge, Landlock, etc.) could be used instead? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grail_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grail_(web_browser) [1] https://grail.sourceforge.net/info/papers/restofus.html https://grail.sourceforge.net/info/papers/restofus.html
- niutech 2y agoYou can run Python in every web browser using PyScript (https://pyscript.net https://pyscript.net) or Brython (https://brython.info https://brython.info).
- johnklos 2y agoI just compiled and uploaded dillo 3.0.5 for NetBSD/m68k... Now I need to try 3.1.0!
- johnklos 2y ago...and it compiled just fine, and ran fine on first launch. Excellent!