8 ms·

Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser

449 points by nazgulsenpai 1y ago

fer 1y ago
Previous/related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
1313ed01 1y ago
I installed the latest (version 1.4) FreeDOS just now and keeping half an eye on the installer as names of installed packages flashed by I noticed Dillo. Is DOS still a supported platform or is FreeDOS shipping some old version? I hope it is the former.
- kolme 1y ago
  AFAIK Dillo is GTK-based, at least the UI part, so I don't think so.
  - gtk40 1y ago
    Nope, it uses https://www.fltk.org/ https://www.fltk.org/
    - axus 1y ago
      FLTK was a pleasure to use (for uncomplicated software). They also put the latest code on Github: https://github.com/fltk/fltk https://github.com/fltk/fltk
    - 1313ed01 1y ago
      I just started it up and it turned out to be Dillo 3.0 from 2011. I do not know if it was using FLTK back then, but a quick search says that FLTK has been ported to DOS so that might not be an obstacle for the current developers to keep FreeDOS support if they wanted to.
  - hagbard_c 1y ago
    Dillo started as a fork of the Armadillo browser which was based on GTK+. It was the next version - Dillo 2 - which was ported to FLTK. The GTK+ version did not support CSS and initially did not support frames/iframes either. I submitted a patch which added support for the latter somewhere around 2003 which was never merged before the port to FLTK but which I have used for quite a while until these features became less important due to the uptake of CSS.
- nazgulsenpai 1y ago
  It looks like FLTK was ported to DOS back in 2011 so it might be real https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2011/11/dillo-a-web-browser-for-dos/ https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2011/11/dillo-a-web-b...
- rodarima 1y ago
  AFAIK Georg Potthast wrote a port that worked in DOS based on the work that Benjamin Johnson for Windows. I believe it was based on 3.0p4: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797 https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797 Unfortunately, none of those ports made their way back to the main project. However, if there is enough interest I would be willing to merge them. I'm not very familiar with DOS/FreeDOS, so probably someone would have to help us to update the changes, but probably doable between 3.0 and 3.2.0.
  - lproven 1y ago
    Really happy to see a new version. I wrote about 3.1, 18 months ago: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/ I don't know if you saw that, but I asked a question in there I am still curious about. In the long time period that Dillo was largely idle, there were various forks. I know of 2 that seem to be dead now... DilloNG https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG D+ https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ But two others seem to be active... Dillo-Plus https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus <- active as recently as September 2024, i.e. since my article. Mobilized Dillo: https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html <- active last month -- and the page links to an article of mine. Nice. :-) I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements? FLTK is now up to 1.4.4, released in July. https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4 https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4 Are you using the latest FLTK? Just curious, not challenging or anything.
    - rodarima 1y ago
      > I wrote about 3.1, 18 months ago Thanks for the article and for including all the references. We now adhere to https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/ as much as we can, where each of the three version numbers has a meaning, so it would be nice to include them all. I'll mention it in the next release (and probably add it to the changelog as well). > I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements? I'm in contact with the Mobilized Dillo developer and we exchange some patches from time to time. > Are you using the latest FLTK? The change from FLTK 1.3.X to 1.4.X breaks many things in Dillo. One of my priorities is to get it fixed ASAP but it will take a while. I'll probably ship experimental support for FLTK 1.4.X under a configure flag in the next 3.3.0 release so I don't delay it for too long.
nicoburns 1y ago
If anyone is interested in a modern take on a lightweight, embeddable web browser / browser engine (that supports features like Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS variables, media queries, etc), then I'm building one over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css https://blitz.is/status/css This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Properties/float https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit. EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
- maxloh 1y ago
  What JavaScript engine are you using/planning to use? I did a quick search on GitHub and found no results.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    That's a bit of an open question at the moment. The obvious choice from a Rust ecosystem perspective (easiest to integrate) would be Boa (https://boajs.dev/ https://boajs.dev/). It has excellent standards conformance, but terrible performance. We'd need to test to what extent that would be an issue in practice. Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos"). There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
- tetrisgm 1y ago
  Took me a sec to understand you didn’t mean you’re adding support for numbers with a comma :)
  - cyanmagenta 1y ago
    Took me a sec to understand you meant comma as “decimal point” :)
kolme 1y ago
I used to use it, like over 20 years ago! Mozilla Suite was too slow for my taste and I only reached for it if Dillo couldn't render a page :) IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.
- jnovek 1y ago
  Exactly the same! I was a student and couldn’t afford a very nice laptop so it was fluxbox + dillo for me.
  - a96 1y ago
    I just used to use dillo because it was faster, cleaner, and left more RAM free for other uses. If there was a sufficiently broken site that I still wanted to bother loading, I'd fire up whatever the big browser was called back then.
gtk40 1y ago
Dillo works surprisingly well. I've used it on older systems running new operating systems. It does a web browser should do best: read web pages.
- agumonkey 1y ago
  the lightness and lack of javascript can be very therapeutic
SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
Was a lifesaver to me back in the day, running my frankenstein machine pieced together from useless spares I cobbled together from the computer store I worked at briefly. Every piece of software I ran was trimmed down to the absolute minimum, and it was a time before the web was completely unusuable without an ad blocker. Fond memories of Dillo.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
gregsadetsky 1y ago
`brew install dillo` on Macs (and see [0] for other platforms) and then `dillo` starts up a 1.1Mb executable that is so freaking, shockingly fast. TIL I also learned that although the Google homepage renders beautifully, I need to "Turn on JavaScript to keep searching" [1] Wow, Google Maps is even snarky-ish about it: "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." (that's what appears! for real) I mean, what was I expecting. U+1F643. [0] https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/install.md https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/insta... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begins_requiring_javascript_for_google/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begi...
- nicoburns 1y ago
  Yeah, Google stopped working without JavaScript in the last year (although I believe this is a region-dependent block and may also vary by user agent string)
  - rodarima 1y ago
    Yeah, I tried to reach out to Google back when they introduced the JS-wall, but they seem to have an AI chatbot acting as a filter, so I didn't spent much energy. Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices. I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
    - nicoburns 1y ago
      Startpage is a good recommendation! I am able to search the web using my browser with startpage. I had tried duckduckgo but have been unable to get past the captcha.
rodarima 1y ago
Maintainer here. We are currently in the process of moving Dillo away from GitHub: - New website (nginx): https://dillo-browser.org/ https://dillo-browser.org/ - Repositories (C, cgit): https://git.dillo-browser.org/ https://git.dillo-browser.org/ - Bug tracker (C, buggy): https://bug.dillo-browser.org/ https://bug.dillo-browser.org/ They should survive HN hug. The CI runs on git hooks and outputs the logs to the web (private for now). All services are very simple and work without JS, so Dillo can be developed fully within Dillo itself. During this testing period I will continue to sync the GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived. See also: - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046 - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097
- fishgoesblub 1y ago
  Why cgit and not something nice like Gitea, or Forgejo?
  - winningChild 1y ago
    [dead]
  - thesuitonym 1y ago
    My guess is gitea and forgejo don't render well in Dillo.
  - Bolwin 1y ago
    They're like 10x more complex and you don't need most of their functionality for just a frontend. That said I wish there was something a little better than cgit
    - messe 1y ago
      Have you looked at self hosting sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/)?
glenstein 1y ago
Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal. I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages. It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.
- ajxs 1y ago
  How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either. But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look. Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
- amelius 1y ago
  One thing I worry about: whether it's ultralight on security features also.
acaloiar 1y ago
I may be imagining this, but I'm nearly certain I was running dillo on a PDA (I want to say Palm Treo) around 2001. I remember it feeling revolutionary to open up a webpage on something other than my linux desktop computer at the time. Over Wifi! I hope it survives another 25 years.
- rodarima 1y ago
  Oldest I could find was an Ipaq 3700: https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/ https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/
KaiserPro 1y ago
Holy fuck, is Dillo still going? thats amazing work. I remember using it with compiz and that whole generation of early 64bit software.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jll29 1y ago
Cool, I installed it on a Mac with M1, which gives you a glimpse how fast live could be without bloat. Using it shows how rotten the World Wide Web has become, with mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com, which I was not aware of. I'm very much looking forward to Ladybird's first alpha release next August.
- throwaway2046 1y ago
  > mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com Note: DuckDuckGo still offers a perfectly usable JS-free search engine if you visit the website from a browser with no/disabled JS support. Almost all other major search engines now require JS to function.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  Someone mentioned that you could install it using Brew. I was a little surprised how quickly it installed. Installing anything via Brew normally take a while, but apparently that's not the fault of Brew, stuff just have a large number of dependencies and a large package size. The lack of JavaScript is an issue in terms of what sites work or even render properly, but damn everything is fast without it.
Figs 1y ago
How is the name pronounced? Is it said like the pickle (Dill-O) or with the Spanish double L (diyo) or something else?
- rodarima 1y ago
  Jorge originally said "Dill-O" in a video, but I almost always say "Diyo" because I'm Spanish and the word comes from the Spanish word "armadillo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo
joshmarinacci 1y ago
I'm impressed. It runs my dev blog quite well. Some of the CSS alignment is off and it doesn't load web fonts, but it looks basically the same as Chrome. Even the syntax highlighted code snippets work. https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03 https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03
- busymom0 1y ago
  > it doesn't load web fonts Some may consider that to be a feature
  - 1313ed01 1y ago
    Some may always have web fonts disabled anyway.
simonw 1y ago
I noticed the original commit to Git was October 2007 - but if you look at that commit it include this Changelog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6c866968312691ec9ab0f6a03/ChangeLog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6... which has the earliest entry of: dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999] Legendary project.
- rodarima 1y ago
  In 2007 it was moved to Mercurial which I then exported to git when the hg server went down. The history from 2002-2007 was lost (I believe SVN), if someone still has a copy please send it to us. See the missing section: https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png The initial release was around the 15th of December, 1999. It's going to be 26 years ago: https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html
  - kragen 1y ago
    Huh, somehow I had the idea that Raph Levien wrote it. The PNG here says corvid, Jeremy Henty, Johannes Hofmann, Jorge Arellano Cid, Rodrigo Arias Mallo (which is presumably you), Sebastian Geerken, and "other". It's good to see that it's active again!
    - rodarima 1y ago
      Raph Levien wrote the original Gzilla browser of which Dillo was forked in late 1999: http://www.levien.com/gzilla/ http://www.levien.com/gzilla/
      - kragen 1y ago
        Oh, that's probably what I was thinking of. Thanks!
  - faragon 11mo ago
    I used Dillo in 2001-2002 with the PlayStation 2 Linux kit. With 32MB of RAM for Linux, and 4MB for the graphics. It worked really well despite the CPU was 294MHz (MIPS R-5900, two-way in-order CPU, with SIMD unit, and only one hardware thread, having two auxiliary vector units as companions).
synergy20 1y ago
last time I played with it, the memory consumption seems similar to chrome when all is loaded and running.
- lproven 1y ago
  I think you might be thinking of something else. I've successfully run Dillo on machines with 40-64 MB of RAM before now, and it hasn't changed that much...
dcassett 1y ago
Dillo was included in the historic Damn Small Linux [1], a 50MB distro. [1] https://damnsmalllinux.org/old-index.html https://damnsmalllinux.org/old-index.html
- hshdhdhehd 1y ago
  Business card sized. Im old enough to know what they meant (a business card shaped CD ROM)
ghssds 1y ago
If I want to know what kind of site I can make compatible with Dillo, is a list of supported elements available?
arjie 1y ago
Wow, this is something. I recall (decades ago, so who knows how accurate) running Dillo under Enlightenment DR17 on a low-spec Pentium (perhaps) in the old era. Glad to see it's still kicking. The computer was too slow for the rest of the software of the era but Dillo was still fast! I was very proud that I could call our home phone line and it would boot the computer if it was off. Most pointless feature ever, but I thought I was hot shit when I was a kid getting that to work.
- jaffa2 1y ago
  That is cool though. was it an atx system with the power triggered some how?
  - arjie 1y ago
    You know, it's been decades and all I remember is the functionality rather than the implementation. It can't have just been some built-in Wake on Ring because I knew I had to do quite a bit of work to make it function (all just a matter of putting things together not that I wrote any code). But an amusing follow-up is that I remember going to the Red Hat offices in Raleigh for an interview for an internship and actually describing the implementation as one of the things I'd done with a computer when I was much younger. It can't have been anything impressive because it didn't land with the interviewer. Silly naïveté of a child to think that's the kind of story you tell. Probably all for the best in the end.
brcmthrowaway 1y ago
How does Dillo compare to WebKit?
- lproven 1y ago
  Er. They both can render HTML? That's about it...
29athrowaway 1y ago
Dillo gave new life to lots of hardware out there that could have otherwise end up in the trash. Many thanks.
cheema33 1y ago
Having never used Dillo before, I just installed it and tried it. And then I found out that it does not support JavaScript at all. There aren’t many or any sites/apps that I regularly use that would work without JavaScript. That limits its usefulness.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  2 rules: If a website needs javascript to be usable, this is a bad website and should be avoided. If it is a webapp, it should provide an API so you use it using your own cli/tui/desktop/mobile client, otherwise it is a bad web app and should be avoided.
shevy-java 1y ago
I can't help but try to find the second 'd' ...
rmoriz 1y ago
I remember using Dillo on my iPAQ around 2002/2003 on Familiar Linux.
potato-peeler 1y ago
Hi, netsurf provides separate html, css and dom parser as an independent lib [1]. Does dillo provide the same? [1] - https://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/
ptx 1y ago
Are there any plans to sandbox the content handling (e.g. HTML parsing and image loading) in a separate process to mitigate e.g. memory-safety issues and other security problems? Firefox [1] and Chrome [2] use seccomp-bpf and various other Linux-specific APIs to implement their sandboxes. FreeBSD provides Capsicum [3] for this, but it's not supported by Firefox or Chrome. Maybe Dillo could use the newer Landlock API [4] on Linux, which is being evaluated [5] for Chrome. This API seems more similar to Capsicum, so it might make it easier to support FreeBSD as well. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox [2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/sandbox/linux/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... [3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum [4] https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/landlock.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/landlock.html [5] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/345514921 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/345514921
- rodarima 1y ago
  Yes, we did some experiments with pledge and landlock, but we need to redesign some parts to be able to properly isolate them into separate processes first. In the short term you can disable CSS or images from the menu. You can also disable specific image decoders from the configuration with the "ignore_image_formats" option.
cachius 1y ago
Seems like a nice addition to the suckless ecosystem. Hah, it’s even listed in their awesome software list https://suckless.org/rocks/ https://suckless.org/rocks/
amelius 1y ago
My adblocker is the one thing that makes my browser pages lightweight. So my question would be: does it have a good adblocker?
- 1313ed01 1y ago
  I do not use an ad-blocker, but NoScript blocks 99.999% or so of ads anyway, so my guess is you will rarely see any ads in Dillo either.
jaffa2 1y ago
Hmm am I missing something? I wanted to download this either for Windows or Mac but I can't find the download link anywhere. It looks Linux only, but the title of this post says Multi-platform. Make it easier for people to download this please. I clicked releases on the hoem page and i get a zip file with a whole bunch of stuff a file named Dillo.Desktop which double clicking tries to open in Gimp and then does nothing. On github it's the same.
bandie91 1y ago
i first met Dillo pre-installed on a DamnSmall Linux CD back around 2005. i also had quite low performance PCs as others say. i browsed via Dillo till my pentium MMX laptop died in 2010 (coincidence?) the other good browser I was happily using on old machines is Elinks. AFAIK it's also picked up again to continue its development, although it's terminal-based. wish endurance for the developers!
Cockbrand 1y ago
In much simpler times (around the turn of the millenium), Dillo was my main browser on my Mac for a while. I loved its simplicity and speed.

449 points by nazgulsenpai 1y ago

fer 1y ago

Previous/related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613

I installed the latest (version 1.4) FreeDOS just now and keeping half an eye on the installer as names of installed packages flashed by I noticed Dillo. Is DOS still a supported platform or is FreeDOS shipping some old version? I hope it is the former.

kolme 1y ago
AFAIK Dillo is GTK-based, at least the UI part, so I don't think so.
- gtk40 1y ago
  Nope, it uses https://www.fltk.org/ https://www.fltk.org/
  - axus 1y ago
    FLTK was a pleasure to use (for uncomplicated software). They also put the latest code on Github: https://github.com/fltk/fltk https://github.com/fltk/fltk
  - 1313ed01 1y ago
    I just started it up and it turned out to be Dillo 3.0 from 2011. I do not know if it was using FLTK back then, but a quick search says that FLTK has been ported to DOS so that might not be an obstacle for the current developers to keep FreeDOS support if they wanted to.
- hagbard_c 1y ago
  Dillo started as a fork of the Armadillo browser which was based on GTK+. It was the next version - Dillo 2 - which was ported to FLTK. The GTK+ version did not support CSS and initially did not support frames/iframes either. I submitted a patch which added support for the latter somewhere around 2003 which was never merged before the port to FLTK but which I have used for quite a while until these features became less important due to the uptake of CSS.
nazgulsenpai 1y ago
It looks like FLTK was ported to DOS back in 2011 so it might be real https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2011/11/dillo-a-web-browser-for-dos/ https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2011/11/dillo-a-web-b...
rodarima 1y ago
AFAIK Georg Potthast wrote a port that worked in DOS based on the work that Benjamin Johnson for Windows. I believe it was based on 3.0p4: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797 https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797 Unfortunately, none of those ports made their way back to the main project. However, if there is enough interest I would be willing to merge them. I'm not very familiar with DOS/FreeDOS, so probably someone would have to help us to update the changes, but probably doable between 3.0 and 3.2.0.
- lproven 1y ago
  Really happy to see a new version. I wrote about 3.1, 18 months ago: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/07/dillo_browser_v3_1/ I don't know if you saw that, but I asked a question in there I am still curious about. In the long time period that Dillo was largely idle, there were various forks. I know of 2 that seem to be dead now... DilloNG https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG D+ https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ But two others seem to be active... Dillo-Plus https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus <- active as recently as September 2024, i.e. since my article. Mobilized Dillo: https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html https://www.toomanyatoms.com/software/mobilized_dillo.html <- active last month -- and the page links to an article of mine. Nice. :-) I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements? FLTK is now up to 1.4.4, released in July. https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4 https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/tag/release-1.4.4 Are you using the latest FLTK? Just curious, not challenging or anything.
  - rodarima 1y ago
    > I wrote about 3.1, 18 months ago Thanks for the article and for including all the references. We now adhere to https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/ as much as we can, where each of the three version numbers has a meaning, so it would be nice to include them all. I'll mention it in the next release (and probably add it to the changelog as well). > I wondered if you were in communication with any of those developers, and if you have managed to bring in any of their code or improvements? I'm in contact with the Mobilized Dillo developer and we exchange some patches from time to time. > Are you using the latest FLTK? The change from FLTK 1.3.X to 1.4.X breaks many things in Dillo. One of my priorities is to get it fixed ASAP but it will take a while. I'll probably ship experimental support for FLTK 1.4.X under a configure flag in the next 3.3.0 release so I don't delay it for too long.

nicoburns 1y ago

If anyone is interested in a modern take on a lightweight, embeddable web browser / browser engine (that supports features like Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS variables, media queries, etc), then I'm building one over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css https://blitz.is/status/css This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Properties/float https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit. EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!

maxloh 1y ago
What JavaScript engine are you using/planning to use? I did a quick search on GitHub and found no results.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  That's a bit of an open question at the moment. The obvious choice from a Rust ecosystem perspective (easiest to integrate) would be Boa (https://boajs.dev/ https://boajs.dev/). It has excellent standards conformance, but terrible performance. We'd need to test to what extent that would be an issue in practice. Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos"). There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
tetrisgm 1y ago
Took me a sec to understand you didn’t mean you’re adding support for numbers with a comma :)
- cyanmagenta 1y ago
  Took me a sec to understand you meant comma as “decimal point” :)

kolme 1y ago

I used to use it, like over 20 years ago! Mozilla Suite was too slow for my taste and I only reached for it if Dillo couldn't render a page :) IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.

jnovek 1y ago
Exactly the same! I was a student and couldn’t afford a very nice laptop so it was fluxbox + dillo for me.
- a96 1y ago
  I just used to use dillo because it was faster, cleaner, and left more RAM free for other uses. If there was a sufficiently broken site that I still wanted to bother loading, I'd fire up whatever the big browser was called back then.

gtk40 1y ago

Dillo works surprisingly well. I've used it on older systems running new operating systems. It does a web browser should do best: read web pages.

agumonkey 1y ago
the lightness and lack of javascript can be very therapeutic

SuperNinKenDo 1y ago

Was a lifesaver to me back in the day, running my frankenstein machine pieced together from useless spares I cobbled together from the computer store I worked at briefly. Every piece of software I ran was trimmed down to the absolute minimum, and it was a time before the web was completely unusuable without an ad blocker. Fond memories of Dillo.

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gregsadetsky 1y ago

`brew install dillo` on Macs (and see [0] for other platforms) and then `dillo` starts up a 1.1Mb executable that is so freaking, shockingly fast. TIL I also learned that although the Google homepage renders beautifully, I need to "Turn on JavaScript to keep searching" [1] Wow, Google Maps is even snarky-ish about it: "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." (that's what appears! for real) I mean, what was I expecting. U+1F643. [0] https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/install.md https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/insta... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begins_requiring_javascript_for_google/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begi...

nicoburns 1y ago
Yeah, Google stopped working without JavaScript in the last year (although I believe this is a region-dependent block and may also vary by user agent string)
- rodarima 1y ago
  Yeah, I tried to reach out to Google back when they introduced the JS-wall, but they seem to have an AI chatbot acting as a filter, so I didn't spent much energy. Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices. I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    Startpage is a good recommendation! I am able to search the web using my browser with startpage. I had tried duckduckgo but have been unable to get past the captcha.

rodarima 1y ago

Maintainer here. We are currently in the process of moving Dillo away from GitHub: - New website (nginx): https://dillo-browser.org/ https://dillo-browser.org/ - Repositories (C, cgit): https://git.dillo-browser.org/ https://git.dillo-browser.org/ - Bug tracker (C, buggy): https://bug.dillo-browser.org/ https://bug.dillo-browser.org/ They should survive HN hug. The CI runs on git hooks and outputs the logs to the web (private for now). All services are very simple and work without JS, so Dillo can be developed fully within Dillo itself. During this testing period I will continue to sync the GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived. See also: - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046 - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097 https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097

fishgoesblub 1y ago
Why cgit and not something nice like Gitea, or Forgejo?
- winningChild 1y ago
  [dead]
- thesuitonym 1y ago
  My guess is gitea and forgejo don't render well in Dillo.
- Bolwin 1y ago
  They're like 10x more complex and you don't need most of their functionality for just a frontend. That said I wish there was something a little better than cgit
  - messe 1y ago
    Have you looked at self hosting sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/)?

glenstein 1y ago

Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal. I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages. It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.

ajxs 1y ago
How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either. But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look. Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
amelius 1y ago
One thing I worry about: whether it's ultralight on security features also.

acaloiar 1y ago

I may be imagining this, but I'm nearly certain I was running dillo on a PDA (I want to say Palm Treo) around 2001. I remember it feeling revolutionary to open up a webpage on something other than my linux desktop computer at the time. Over Wifi! I hope it survives another 25 years.

rodarima 1y ago
Oldest I could find was an Ipaq 3700: https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/ https://dillo-browser.github.io/gallery/

KaiserPro 1y ago

Holy fuck, is Dillo still going? thats amazing work. I remember using it with compiz and that whole generation of early 64bit software.

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jll29 1y ago

Cool, I installed it on a Mac with M1, which gives you a glimpse how fast live could be without bloat. Using it shows how rotten the World Wide Web has become, with mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com, which I was not aware of. I'm very much looking forward to Ladybird's first alpha release next August.

throwaway2046 1y ago
> mandatory JavaScript everywhere, even on google.com Note: DuckDuckGo still offers a perfectly usable JS-free search engine if you visit the website from a browser with no/disabled JS support. Almost all other major search engines now require JS to function.
mrweasel 1y ago
Someone mentioned that you could install it using Brew. I was a little surprised how quickly it installed. Installing anything via Brew normally take a while, but apparently that's not the fault of Brew, stuff just have a large number of dependencies and a large package size. The lack of JavaScript is an issue in terms of what sites work or even render properly, but damn everything is fast without it.

Figs 1y ago

How is the name pronounced? Is it said like the pickle (Dill-O) or with the Spanish double L (diyo) or something else?

rodarima 1y ago
Jorge originally said "Dill-O" in a video, but I almost always say "Diyo" because I'm Spanish and the word comes from the Spanish word "armadillo": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo

joshmarinacci 1y ago

I'm impressed. It runs my dev blog quite well. Some of the CSS alignment is off and it doesn't load web fonts, but it looks basically the same as Chrome. Even the syntax highlighted code snippets work. https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03 https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03

busymom0 1y ago
> it doesn't load web fonts Some may consider that to be a feature
- 1313ed01 1y ago
  Some may always have web fonts disabled anyway.

simonw 1y ago

I noticed the original commit to Git was October 2007 - but if you look at that commit it include this Changelog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6c866968312691ec9ab0f6a03/ChangeLog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6... which has the earliest entry of: dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999] Legendary project.

rodarima 1y ago
In 2007 it was moved to Mercurial which I then exported to git when the hg server went down. The history from 2002-2007 was lost (I believe SVN), if someone still has a copy please send it to us. See the missing section: https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png The initial release was around the 15th of December, 1999. It's going to be 26 years ago: https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html
- kragen 1y ago
  Huh, somehow I had the idea that Raph Levien wrote it. The PNG here says corvid, Jeremy Henty, Johannes Hofmann, Jorge Arellano Cid, Rodrigo Arias Mallo (which is presumably you), Sebastian Geerken, and "other". It's good to see that it's active again!
  - rodarima 1y ago
    Raph Levien wrote the original Gzilla browser of which Dillo was forked in late 1999: http://www.levien.com/gzilla/ http://www.levien.com/gzilla/
    - kragen 1y ago
      Oh, that's probably what I was thinking of. Thanks!
- faragon 11mo ago
  I used Dillo in 2001-2002 with the PlayStation 2 Linux kit. With 32MB of RAM for Linux, and 4MB for the graphics. It worked really well despite the CPU was 294MHz (MIPS R-5900, two-way in-order CPU, with SIMD unit, and only one hardware thread, having two auxiliary vector units as companions).

synergy20 1y ago

last time I played with it, the memory consumption seems similar to chrome when all is loaded and running.

lproven 1y ago
I think you might be thinking of something else. I've successfully run Dillo on machines with 40-64 MB of RAM before now, and it hasn't changed that much...

dcassett 1y ago

Dillo was included in the historic Damn Small Linux [1], a 50MB distro. [1] https://damnsmalllinux.org/old-index.html https://damnsmalllinux.org/old-index.html

hshdhdhehd 1y ago
Business card sized. Im old enough to know what they meant (a business card shaped CD ROM)

ghssds 1y ago

If I want to know what kind of site I can make compatible with Dillo, is a list of supported elements available?

arjie 1y ago

Wow, this is something. I recall (decades ago, so who knows how accurate) running Dillo under Enlightenment DR17 on a low-spec Pentium (perhaps) in the old era. Glad to see it's still kicking. The computer was too slow for the rest of the software of the era but Dillo was still fast! I was very proud that I could call our home phone line and it would boot the computer if it was off. Most pointless feature ever, but I thought I was hot shit when I was a kid getting that to work.

jaffa2 1y ago
That is cool though. was it an atx system with the power triggered some how?
- arjie 1y ago
  You know, it's been decades and all I remember is the functionality rather than the implementation. It can't have just been some built-in Wake on Ring because I knew I had to do quite a bit of work to make it function (all just a matter of putting things together not that I wrote any code). But an amusing follow-up is that I remember going to the Red Hat offices in Raleigh for an interview for an internship and actually describing the implementation as one of the things I'd done with a computer when I was much younger. It can't have been anything impressive because it didn't land with the interviewer. Silly naïveté of a child to think that's the kind of story you tell. Probably all for the best in the end.

brcmthrowaway 1y ago

How does Dillo compare to WebKit?

lproven 1y ago
Er. They both can render HTML? That's about it...

29athrowaway 1y ago

Dillo gave new life to lots of hardware out there that could have otherwise end up in the trash. Many thanks.

cheema33 1y ago

Having never used Dillo before, I just installed it and tried it. And then I found out that it does not support JavaScript at all. There aren’t many or any sites/apps that I regularly use that would work without JavaScript. That limits its usefulness.

prmoustache 1y ago
2 rules: If a website needs javascript to be usable, this is a bad website and should be avoided. If it is a webapp, it should provide an API so you use it using your own cli/tui/desktop/mobile client, otherwise it is a bad web app and should be avoided.

shevy-java 1y ago

I can't help but try to find the second 'd' ...

rmoriz 1y ago

I remember using Dillo on my iPAQ around 2002/2003 on Familiar Linux.

potato-peeler 1y ago

Hi, netsurf provides separate html, css and dom parser as an independent lib [1]. Does dillo provide the same? [1] - https://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/

ptx 1y ago

Are there any plans to sandbox the content handling (e.g. HTML parsing and image loading) in a separate process to mitigate e.g. memory-safety issues and other security problems? Firefox [1] and Chrome [2] use seccomp-bpf and various other Linux-specific APIs to implement their sandboxes. FreeBSD provides Capsicum [3] for this, but it's not supported by Firefox or Chrome. Maybe Dillo could use the newer Landlock API [4] on Linux, which is being evaluated [5] for Chrome. This API seems more similar to Capsicum, so it might make it easier to support FreeBSD as well. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox [2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/sandbox/linux/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... [3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum [4] https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/landlock.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/landlock.html [5] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/345514921 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/345514921

rodarima 1y ago
Yes, we did some experiments with pledge and landlock, but we need to redesign some parts to be able to properly isolate them into separate processes first. In the short term you can disable CSS or images from the menu. You can also disable specific image decoders from the configuration with the "ignore_image_formats" option.

cachius 1y ago

Seems like a nice addition to the suckless ecosystem. Hah, it’s even listed in their awesome software list https://suckless.org/rocks/ https://suckless.org/rocks/

amelius 1y ago

My adblocker is the one thing that makes my browser pages lightweight. So my question would be: does it have a good adblocker?

1313ed01 1y ago
I do not use an ad-blocker, but NoScript blocks 99.999% or so of ads anyway, so my guess is you will rarely see any ads in Dillo either.

jaffa2 1y ago

Hmm am I missing something? I wanted to download this either for Windows or Mac but I can't find the download link anywhere. It looks Linux only, but the title of this post says Multi-platform. Make it easier for people to download this please. I clicked releases on the hoem page and i get a zip file with a whole bunch of stuff a file named Dillo.Desktop which double clicking tries to open in Gimp and then does nothing. On github it's the same.

bandie91 1y ago

i first met Dillo pre-installed on a DamnSmall Linux CD back around 2005. i also had quite low performance PCs as others say. i browsed via Dillo till my pentium MMX laptop died in 2010 (coincidence?) the other good browser I was happily using on old machines is Elinks. AFAIK it's also picked up again to continue its development, although it's terminal-based. wish endurance for the developers!

Cockbrand 1y ago

In much simpler times (around the turn of the millenium), Dillo was my main browser on my Mac for a while. I loved its simplicity and speed.