About me

• I'm a computer scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (HPC)
• I've been using Dillo for about 10 years on old computers
• I mostly program in C
• Simplicity is beautiful

What is Dillo?

• Dillo is a very lightweight graphical web browser
• Has its own rendering engine and uses FLTK for the UI
• Support for a reasonable subset of HTML and CSS
• Doesn't support Javascript
• 25 years old project, since 1999

What is Dillo?

• Dillo is a very lightweight graphical web browser
• Has its own rendering engine and uses FLTK for the UI
• Support for a reasonable subset of HTML and CSS
• Doesn't support Javascript
• 25 years old project, since 1999
• This presentation is shown in Dillo itself!

Objectives

• Lower the barrier of entry to the web (computational / network)
• User privacy (no cookies by default, no JS, no telemetry)
• Efficiency (fast and stream rendering, small codebase)
• Easy to use for users by default

Abandoned in 2017

• In 2016, rendering engine developer █ Sebastian Geerken passed away
• In 2017, lead developer █ Jorge Arellano Cid not active anymore
• In 2022, DNS lost and someone took over dillo.org to serve SPAM
• Gone: Email server, website, repo, mailing list, bug tracker
• Last official release 3.0.5 in 2015, some unreleased changes since then

Resurrection in 2024

• In early 2024 I decided to try to resurrect it
• Old content recovered and backed up on GitHub and archive.org
• Setup a GitHub organization and a new website: https://dillo-browser.github.io
• New mailing list at dillo-dev@mailman3.com
• Donations at Liberapay https://liberapay.com/dillo/ and IRC channel at libera: #dillo

Release 3.1.0 after 9 years!

• Automatic HTML rendering tests
• GitHub CI pipeline to build and pass the test suite
• Added support for OpenSSL/LibreSSL along with Mbed TLS
• Released version 3.1.0 with minimal changes
• Quickly adopted by several Linux/BSD distributions

Release 3.2.0 two weeks ago

• SVG support for Wikipedia math formulas, WebP too
• Scrollbar page navigation mode
• Open URLs with custom programs or commands
• Zoom control with Ctrl +/-/0
• Reload the current page with SIGUSR1

Old netbook for testing

• Intel Atom N455 from 2010, the CPU is 15 years old!
• 1 core at 1.66 GHz with 2 HW threads (Hyper Threading)
• Very small cache: L1d 24 KiB / L1i 32 KiB / L2 512 KiB / L3 Nope
• RAM is 2 GiB with 4 GiB of SWAP
• Fast SSD as disk
• Bought second hand for 30 € + new SSD disk

Open link with external tools

• Dillo doesn't play audio or video
• But you can just open the URL in any program you like:

  link_action="Open in MPV:mpv $url"
  link_action="Open in Firefox:firefox $url"

• Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6mb9qt2-3o
• Geo links: FOSDEM, Barcelona

Extensible with plugins

• Plugins implement new protocols in any language
• Similar to CGI scripts but simpler
• Gemini (C/Go): Weather, Antenna
• Gopher (C): SDF, Floodgap
• Man (Bash): Dillo, Git tutorial, Gcc (big!)
• Bloated page → Reader mode

Examples of bloated websites

Anything that you find in the "modern" Web is broken or bloated, requiring you to run JavaScript to display mostly text websites:

• Big tech: Reddit, Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, Google Maps
• News: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, BBC old
• Misc: Mastodon, Bandcamp
• Search engines: Google^New!, Bing

Examples of simple websites

These websites work well with a subset of HTML and CSS and degrade nicely without JavaScript:

• Blogs/personal: XXIIVV, 100r.co, Datagubbe, idlewords.com, Seirdy
• News/link agregators: NPR (text), LWN, HN, Lobste.rs
• Forums: phpBB, vBulletin, Little forum, WordPress
• Alternative frontends: Invidious (YouTube), Tent (Bandcamp), Brutaldon (Mastodon)
• Search engines: Wiby, Mojeek, DuckDuckGo (lite)... (more at Seirdy post)

Performance gap

Performance measurements

• All measurements are done in this netbook.
• Intel Atom N455 from 2010, CPU is 15 years
• The page loaded is the Dillo website: https://dillo-browser.github.io
• The results show CPU time spent measured with perf stat

Codebase complexity

• A large codebase is a barrier for patches.
• Dillo is very small compared with "big" browsers.
• Distributed in a single floppy disk!

Low barrier for compiling

• Apart from using the browser, it is also important to be able to hack it
• Two main constraints: build time and peak memory (RSS) required for linking
• Can be hacked with 15 year old machines in reasonable time

The end

• Remember that not everyone can get the latest computer or fast networks.
• But everyone should be able to read the content of the Web.
• Allow people to choose using newer technologies like JS or fallback to plain HTML.


• Thanks for your attention!
• Questions? Some page you want to test?