Lightweight Dillo Browser Resurrected: TLS But No JavaScript (theregister.com) 39
The Dillo browser dates back to 1999, writes the Register, with its own rendering engine. And now Dillo "has returned with a new release, version 3.1.
"It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015." Version 3.1 incorporates dozens of fixes and improvements, as the official announcement describes.
Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial repository, incorporated about 25 outstanding fixes, and added as many again of his own.
Dillo is a super-lightweight graphical web browser for Unix-like OSes, written using the Fast Light Toolkit. The latest version has a number of new features, although one of the most significant is support for Transport Layer Security. TLS is the successor to SSL, with a Microsoft-approved name. Dillo 3.1 supports it thanks to the Mbed-TLS library.
It doesn't support frames, embedded media playback, or JavaSccript — but it can run on very low-end hardware...
Thanks to Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) for sharing the news.
"It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015." Version 3.1 incorporates dozens of fixes and improvements, as the official announcement describes.
Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial repository, incorporated about 25 outstanding fixes, and added as many again of his own.
Dillo is a super-lightweight graphical web browser for Unix-like OSes, written using the Fast Light Toolkit. The latest version has a number of new features, although one of the most significant is support for Transport Layer Security. TLS is the successor to SSL, with a Microsoft-approved name. Dillo 3.1 supports it thanks to the Mbed-TLS library.
It doesn't support frames, embedded media playback, or JavaSccript — but it can run on very low-end hardware...
Thanks to Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) for sharing the news.
Also see (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Also see (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people looked at the home page and were like "Lightweight Dildo Browser"?
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Phew! I thought it was just me.
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Honestly, if someone made a browser capable of finding actual lightweight dildos when I type that in, I'd use it. Searching for products is SEO hell these days.
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"lightweight dildo"
first result:
https://www.amazon.es/Dildos-J... [amazon.es]
second:
https://es.aliexpress.com/w/wh... [aliexpress.com]
thank me later!
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The first Amazon result is for "Fleshlight Mr. Limpy Dildo" and the AliExpress page is full of butt-plugs!
See, this is what I'm talking about, low quality results.
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That heavyweight dildo browser was weighing me down.
Made useless by "anti-bot" technology (Score:4, Interesting)
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why ironically? if usability ever had been a priority slashdot would be a rss feed or an archive. nerds and geeks notwithstanding, it was born as a genuine "web 2.0" baby. all those juicy clicks ...
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why ironically?
Because of the number of Slashdot users specifically who block javascript, use no script, or do anything else that screws with precisely the kind of functionality that /. relies on posting.
The users make it ironic, not the fact that it's not rss.
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Didn't Slashdot at least use to have a rss feed? I seem to recall something like that but it could have been a third party thing...
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Slashdot RSS (Score:3)
Didn't Slashdot at least use to have a rss feed?
https://slashdot.org/faq/feeds... [slashdot.org]
recommended: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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yeah, well, enjoy your 0.002% of the web.
true, most of the other 99.998% is rubbish anyway, and javascript is instrumental to that, but not really the cause.
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And that's a sad thing.
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everyone wants you drinking the Chrome-aid
Here's the deal. Everyone got frustrated with Flash, they wanted something open that wasn't Flash. So HTML5 was created. Now, it's too Javascript heavy. Yeah, that's what everyone wanted.
I've seen over 95% of them die
Yes because the HTML spec is a 1400 page tome of text, not even getting into all the various java script, HTTP/3, and so forth. It would take a person months to digest the full specification and five times that to just begin hammering out the basics to properly rendering the DOM. HTML 5 is completely unknowable to a s
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Now, it's too Javascript heavy. Yeah, that's what everyone wanted.
sort of. the thing is that interactive webapps are really a useful thing to have, and the html/js frankenstein creature is actually a quite good technical platform all considering (which is why it took over the web). then again, most of the internet's actual content doesn't need to be a webapp, and would be way more accessible and useful as plain and simple documents. like there shouldn't really be any need for every single http request to ping back to a zillion spying leeches, or every user action being tr
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>"They're all gone. No one is here to save us. The web IS CHROME and that is the end of that story."
Well, almost. The web is essentially chrom*, Firefox, and Safari. And if you are non-Apple, which the huge majority of devices, the web is essentially chrom* and Firefox. We still have a choice to not let Google take over and fully control what little is left.
As for the rest, there are great uses for HTML5 stuff, for sure. But a ton of sh** came along with it.
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Sites are Javascript heavy for two reasons.
1. Move processing to the client, save money on server resources. Bandwidth is often cheaper than CPU/memory.
2. Devs rely on massive, inefficient frameworks.
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Demand an accessible site, that usually scares the crap out of them. You will be helping people who need accessibility tools too.
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I've tried hundreds of browsers over my 25 years of using the internet, and I've seen over 95% of them die.
Are browsers unique in that regard?
From unpopularity to vaporware to crushing corrupt competition, 95% sounds about right. Across the tech board. Cashed or crushed out, distilled down to a handful of mega-corps so large they’re likely Too Big To Fail.
And I hope (Score:3)
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And I hope dillo never uses Javascript. It is one of the reasons I still use it. Congratulations to the team!
Because you too like most of the internet broken?
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>"But these sites insist on being complex for reasons only known to them"
It isn't that mysterious. Marketing departments *love* animated sh**. They want to "wow" the visitor with every possible annoying pop-up, pop-under, fly-out, hidden-menu, white-space-laden, overlay, fade in/out, carousel, mouse-over, forced smooth-scrolling, fixed-width, busy status, infinite-vertical-scrolling gizmo. It is their desperate [and mostly successful] attempt to turn webs site into a 100% controlled TV commercials.
Dillo vs. LiteHTML (Score:5, Informative)
We used Dillo a long time ago for internal rendering of some stuff for thin clients.
A few years ago, the Fancy html renderer under Claws Mail became not obtainable, and we tried to switch to Dillo, and it was a disaster. Worked great in testing. Then when we rolled it out on a multiuser application server, we discovered it doesn't work correctly multiuser (at least with the Claws plugin) and switched to LightHTML engine plugin which works even better than Dillo. It, too, doesn't support javascript, but I think it also doesn't support TLS. Anyway, it is an interesting project that has been getting updates:
http://www.litehtml.com/ [litehtml.com]
https://github.com/litehtml/li... [github.com]
and also has its own stand-alone mini-browser (litebrowser):
https://github.com/litehtml/li... [github.com]
OK (Score:1)
How many women downloaded this browser and were disappointed?
... bad brain, bad! (Score:1)
Woo, front page! (Score:2)
Well, if that doesn't help my karma, what will? ;-)
BTW I didn't just submit it, I wrote the article as well.