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Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by krylon on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @05:53PM (#38848186)
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

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by minitech on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @06:51PM (#38848829)
> 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).

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by astowaway on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:30PM (#38849588)
I 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]

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by rodarima on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:40PM (#38849660)
I 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.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by ajot on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @10:27PM (#38850332)
Hey, nice to see you here Mr Stallman, thank you for all the hard work all these years :)
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by necovek on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:01AM (#38852086)
Mr Stallman would probably be using wget which is a GNU project, if not downloading directly from Emacs.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by anthk on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @04:41AM (#38852258)
Or just use eww from Emacs.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by krylon on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @10:32AM (#38855233)
For some reason I started using w3m with emacs integration years ago and am very comfortable with it. I know eww exists, but I think I only tried it once or twice.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by harryvederci on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @05:14AM (#38852438)
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.

Source: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by minitech on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @09:33PM (#38849983)
Sure, Dillo in a sandbox is a big improvement over Dillo not in a sandbox (don’t forget an isolated X instance when you’re doing bubblewrap, ’cause FLTK 1.3 doesn’t support Wayland). I’d still feel more comfortable with mainstream browsers (and yes, they can handle many tabs on a still-small amount of memory).
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by rodarima on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @06:17PM (#38848473)
> 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 :-)

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by bluedino on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @07:26PM (#38849118)
>> 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!

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by tentacleuno on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:51PM (#38849726)
> 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.

Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by lmz on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @09:17PM (#38849877)
I 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
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @06:41PM (#38848742)
I also like dillo, but just as an option - have you tried netsurf as well? Likewise very lightweight.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by nmz on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:15PM (#38849482)
dillo 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.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:28PM (#38849571)
Sure; I personally view it as a continuum of lynx..elinks..dillo..netsurf..........firefox is so. Just pointing out that netsurf is close to dillo.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by krylon on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @08:17PM (#38849505)
I have. I only discovered it about two weeks ago, though. But so far, I do like it. Thank you!
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by niutech on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @09:18PM (#38849884)
Try 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).
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by barbs on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:29AM (#38851370)
Which 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?
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by nicman23 on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:07AM (#38851510)
firefox with umatrix probably will be better for that hardware.
Re:Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser by anthk on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @08:47AM (#38853976)
Zramup 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.