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).
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]
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 :-)
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!
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.
#!/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.
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