
Dillo: A Tiny Graphical Web Browser - vmorgulis
http://www.dillo.org/
======
kozukumi
I love Dillo. It reminds me of when I was ~14 back in the mid-to-late 90s and
learning C++ with a copy of Visual Studio 97 my dad "got me from work". Back
then things were very different and teenage me wrote a pretty nice browser
from scratch with the exception of some networking code.

Back then a browser was just another application on your computer, almost like
a calculator something. It was just a tool. Now the web browser is probably
the most complex bit of software on your computer. Crazy how far things have
come in the past 20 years.

Also it is great to see FLTK in use, it is a nice little toolkit albeit not
the prettiest :)

~~~
dijit
Personally I dislike this trend, it pushes the onus of application development
into the domain of web developers, and they have shoddy tools (javascript?)
and have to program for multiple platforms (chrome/firefox/IE) and- at the end
of the day, nobody is signing your code (not like native programs).

At least we finally have a system that is multiplatform- but my web browser is
seriously hungry, added to that most websites dictate how they will display
their information to me- I seem to get less choice year on year. (and yes, I
know I can plug my browser full of add-ons which give me back some control,
but if JS doesn't run for instance, I don't even see the page in many cases,
and this serves to increase how hungry the browser is)

~~~
untog
_added to that most websites dictate how they will display their information
to me_

Yet you say you miss native apps, which absolutely dictate everything about
how they work?

~~~
the_real_nfm
A lot of native "apps" have either very flexible configuration, or some sort
of scripting/plugin framework. Maybe not iTunes, but things like foobar2000 or
conky.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
A few do. But most do not offer the incredible user presentation freedom the
web does.

~~~
astine
In choosing between presentation freedom and a sane GUI programming model, I'd
choose the later, especially given that the 'presentation freedom' is
problematic when I want my desktop to have a common UI theme. Take into
account that modern GUI toolkits actually provide presentation freedom similar
to the web _without_ having to do without native widgets, I don't see why
anyone would prefer web GUIs from a programming perspective.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> modern GUI toolkits actually provide presentation freedom similar to the web

They let you change colours, typefaces and shapes slightly. You could do that
with Windows 1.

That's not the same as what CSS allows (complete reconfiguration).

~~~
astine
[http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/scene/doc-
files/c...](http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/scene/doc-
files/cssref.html)

------
anjbe
A browser that fills a similar niche: NetSurf.

[http://www.netsurf-browser.org/](http://www.netsurf-browser.org/)
[http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/screenshots/](http://www.netsurf-
browser.org/about/screenshots/)

~~~
splitbrain
And in my limited tries Netsurf is faster and much much better at displaying
modern websites (not perfect of course).

~~~
agumonkey
Weird, I felt a huge latency gap between the two. Of course dillo renders
things naively so it's almost an immediate mode, but it also regularly display
things under 0.5s[1] which feels impressively good.

[1] if not lower... I can't time it, but to describe it I'd say, rendering is
done when the Return key is up. Seriously nice.

------
Lennu
Got stable release from Ubuntu repositories with apt-get.

Most of the websites work, but are visually broken. Google seems to be working
okay.

But the speed is super. It is like Firefox, Chrome and IE are these big slow
monsters and Dillo is the little hero running around them.

Dillo shows pages, other process them.

~~~
draven
That's their objective :
[http://www.dillo.org/funding/objectives.html](http://www.dillo.org/funding/objectives.html)

It does not work for "apps", but to read documents (the initial purpose of the
web), it's excellent.

------
fractallyte
Also don't forget Links browser with the '-g' option (text-based with
graphics!). Super fast, with simple keyboard controls, or mouse if you really
need to.

~~~
cobweb
I find lynx/terminal style browsers easier to read. But one thing I did notice
was that they were slower than some of the graphical ones (the last time I
tried). So I ended up modding my GUI web browsers for readability.

I'd like to see a speed comparison.

A browser where you disable JS, CSS and images, you'd hope may be smart enough
to not fetch or process unneeded assets.

I have a 1.4mb connection at home, and many sites are painful to use, to the
point I just don't bother. Because of lavish asset loading - with advertising
etc.

Most of my web reading is suspended to the future: add to queue -> process
page to text -> send to e-reader, partly as it's more comfortable, and also
because of sluggishness in sites/pages.

On faster connections/faster computers it's less of a pain. Mobile is
generally a world of pain (for me at least)!

~~~
luxpir
Do you use custom scripts for that reading workflow, or something more
generally available? Could be a nice partial solution for procrastination.

~~~
cobweb
I didn't really want to flag a specific e-reader. And was hinting at something
more general. As you say I'm sure you could bolt something together, like I
have been meaning to.

At the moment it's as boring as a readability bookmarklet. That then sends the
parsed html to a free kindle address. Readability will accept urls to process
in emails. But this doesn't work for me. I forget why. Also readability
sometimes borks and I never get the page. And sometimes readability can't read
something. It just comes out blank. Probably a JS heavy page or something.
Managing readability archives and searching through them isn't that great. I'm
not really a fan of the readability web browser interface. I haven't tried the
apps. But it does the job for free so I mustn't grumble.

I'd rather email/bookmark links, to process later, to then read at my leisure.
And also text index them. Something to improve searching. Also the ability to
rate or summarise what I've read.

I get articles that upon reading, I don't like. So chaff does get through. I
could do with applying feedback. Flagging bad (as in I don't like) sites, bad
authors etc. One problem is that I can't do the feedback there and then from
my e-reader when I'm in the moment. But actually it might be a good re-
enforcment tactic to come back and evaluate later. It would be nice to then
share good reads.

An email address for reads is good, as you can always ask others to send you
stuff. Or perhaps forward an email containing a link to your reading address.

I have cognitive difficulty reading from a browser, but am fine with e-ink.
Plus it doesn't require an internet connection. It's comfortable. I do tend to
neglect my book reading though, which is a bit of a shame. Oh and I have a
mountain of articles to read, currently about 1200.

With what comes through with readability, sometimes the author is missing.
Probably meta data missing. And not having dates and other meta data available
can be annoying. Having a datestamp of when I bookmarked it for reading might
be nice.

~~~
cobweb
Oh, there is Calibre, that I have been meaning to try and use. But it's nice
to be able to just turn on the kindle (as I'm in the shower or something), and
have it download latest reads before I leave the house. Rather than fussing
about connecting the machine to another machine etc.

~~~
falcolas
If you can leave Calibre running, it will process RSS subscriptions in the
background on a schedule.

------
zem
i used to use this as my documentation browser. it's ideal for the purpose -
opens instantly, very fast and responsive, and typically html docs don't need
anything fancier than dillo can handle.

------
vmorgulis
[http://www.dillo.org/screenshots/index.html](http://www.dillo.org/screenshots/index.html)

------
chris_wot
Looks like they have their own plugin framework. I've been watching the Dillo
project for sometime, in 2005 I had feared it was dead, but it has been
remarkably unkillable thank goodness!

Their change log is quite comprehensive:

[http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/tip/ChangeLog](http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/tip/ChangeLog)

Refreshingly for me, they have tried to do a lot of documentation, which can
be found here:

[http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/devdoc](http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/devdoc)

------
balladeer
This reminds me of Midori[1] which I loved using while I was on
ElementaryOS[2]. It was such a refreshing change from years of using bloated
Chrome and Firefox which they still are, more so.

[1] [http://midori-browser.org](http://midori-browser.org) [2]
[https://elementary.io/](https://elementary.io/)

~~~
hybridtupel
Which os do you use now? Why did you change?

~~~
balladeer
I use OSX now.

That's what I used at home for the last ~4 years. But At my work I was using
Ubuntu and Windows in my last job. In current job (~5 months) I was given a
Dell laptop initially on which I had set up Elementary and after some time I
was given a Macbook Pro. So that's how I changed. Also, Elementary wouldn't be
called stable really (and they don't claim so) - till few months ago at least,
I still liked it.

------
estefan
One letter away from something completely different. Anyone ever thought about
renaming this? I had to look twice...

~~~
kzhahou
Actually, it's two letters away. PilloW

~~~
livatlantis
You're right. I too was disappointed. AFAIK, not a single pillow has made it
to the front page of HN. And we're all still waiting.

They should definitely rename to avoid further confusion (not to mention the
false sense of hope).

------
mosburger
About 10 years ago I got an old discarded, MIPS based HP workstation from
work. Dillo was the only browser I could get to compile on that box's Gentoo
distribution at the time, I remember it being really fast but not being able
to render a lot of stuff. I'm surprised the project is still going!

------
deuill
I used to help port Linux to various devices like the HP Jornada [0] or the
Ben Nanonote [1], both of which have (up to) 32MB of RAM available.

Finding a suitable web browser with reasonable support for "modern" web
standards (basically CSS2) and a lightweight footprint was terribly hard...
the better ones, as I remember them, were:

1) Dillo[2], which was one of the most lightweight graphical browsers under
active development, albeit a bit light on features as well... FLTK is a great
toolkit, and runs well on resource-starved devices like the ones mentioned
above.

2) Netsurf[3], a relative newcomer, had one of the best rendering engines out
there considering its lightweight footprint. It too is under active
development, and is moving towards HTML5 and CSS3 compatibility. Has GTK2 and
framebuffer backends, the last of which is better in terms of memory
footprint.

3) Konqueror-Embedded[4], which hasn't seen development since the mid-2000s,
was actually the only browser with reasonable support for web standards and
support for Javascript. Built against QT2 (which is a massive chore in
itself), it runs fast and has a low memory footprint.

4) Links-hacked[5], which again hasn't seen any development in more than 10
years, worked pretty well in graphical mode. It's a mix between elinks code
(before Javascript support was gutted out) and links2 code (for the graphical
parts).

Some failed experiments were:

Firefox version 1.0.8, last release with GTK 1.2 support, was, unfortunately,
too slow to run in any reasonable way. Startup time was around 1:30 minutes on
the HP Jornada, and navigating to any web-page took more than 3 minutes.

Hv3[6], a browser and engine built in TCL/TK, looked promising but was a
nightmare to compile and never worked correctly.

Finding modern software that can run well in such memory-constrained
enviroment was hard enough, let alone something as complex as a web rendering
engine.

[0]: [https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-
vargtass](https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-vargtass) [1]:
[https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-muffinman](https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-
muffinman) [2]: [http://www.dillo.org/](http://www.dillo.org/) [3]:
[http://www.netsurf-browser.org/](http://www.netsurf-browser.org/) [4]:
[https://konqueror.org/embedded/](https://konqueror.org/embedded/) [5]:
[http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-
hacked/](http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/) [6]:
[http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html](http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html)

------
luxpir
Am I right in thinking that Dillo doesn't load any JS by default? I'd imagine
your user-agent would be quite a giveaway in this case, but still, perhaps
nice to use in that respect.

------
ausjke
Used this way back time, but then somehow still use firefox these days. Had
some javascript issues but overall it's usable.

------
magic_beans
I know this is an extremely naive question, but what is the advantage to using
a nonstandard browser over one of the big four?

------
wgx
I tried a while back to get this to build for OSX but gave up after a few
rabbit holes.

~~~
fcambus
Dillo is part of Pkgsrc, and can easily be installed on OS X.

Bootstrap this : [https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-
osx/](https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/)

And then it's as easy as : pkgin install dillo

~~~
wgx
hmmm.. looks like dillo isn't an available package?

    
    
      pkgin avail | grep browser

~~~
fcambus
Haven't checked 2015Q3 yet, still using 2015Q2 where it's available. It might
be broken or failed to build in 2015Q3 then :(

------
chmielewski
netsurf or uzbl over dillo any day of the week, with xxxterm receiving an
honorable mention. Vim user currently using iceweasel with vimperator after
trying many minimalist WebKit browsers.

------
voltagex_
>Bug Tracker

>[currently broken]

------
briankwest
Yes because what we need are more browsers with less function parity.

------
thom
links -g for life.

------
guard-of-terra
It's lightning fast. Makes you feel what you've lost with all the css+js.

~~~
smt88
Browsing could never be slower than what we had without modern CSS/JS: desktop
applications. If you think we've lost anything (speed, convenience, whatever)
with CSS/JS, then you don't remember (or willfully forgot) what the web was
like in the 90s.

~~~
bananaoomarang
But that was because we were all using dial up, now the problem is the
processing power required to crunch the overly-abstracted CSS/js output of our
huge and complex toolchains.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It's not just processing power, it's all the round-trips and timeouts and
social buttons delays.

~~~
gopowerranger
And advertising.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Dumb banners or text adverts would be pretty fast, but all that script-loaded,
dynamically retargetted, real time bidded crap is pretty slow.

~~~
gopowerranger
Except dumb banner and adverts are NOT pretty fast and a frequent cause of the
spinner still running long after the page loads.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Meaning they are not dumb enough.

