[HN Gopher] Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo Browser
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo Browser
Hi, in mid 2022 the host dillo.org expired [0], taking down the
website, mercurial repo, the mailing list and the email server used
to reach the core developers of Dillo. Someone bought it and now
serves a weird clone of the original page with missing content.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32448104 I felt sad as I
didn't want it to die, so I got a copy of the repo from my hard
disk, uploaded it to GitHub and decided to do some maintenance on
the code to at least keep the build working. After some time, the
folks at Atari Forum decided to use my repo to port it to the Atari
platform and they managed to do it [1]. [1]:
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues/34 That gave me some
motivation to work a bit more on the project to prevent it from
dying. So I created an organization under the name of "dillo-
browser" and made a new webpage [2] with a backup of the old one.
[2]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/ With the help of Andreas
Kemnade which had access to the original server, we managed to
backup most of the stuff from the original website (including non-
reachable pages) which I uploaded to the Archive. In the
meanwhile, I combined the support for both OpenSSL (1.1 and 3) and
mbedTLS (2 and 3) as well as proper CI with rendering tests. We now
build Dillo for Ubuntu, FreeBSD and macOS! I also became familiar
with the plugin mechanism in Dillo, which allows any program that
uses the standard input and output to become a plugin registered to
a given protocol (like file://...). I did a simple one (which is
just a bash script) to read local manual pages which is handy to
follow links to other pages [3], but check also the ones Charles E.
Lehner did which are more advanced [4]. [3]:
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man [4]:
https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/WGEMg7AXN4o/ As of today, I'm
unable to contact the main developer, Jorge Arellano Cid, which has
not interacted with the mailing list for some years now. Jorge, if
you read this, please contact with me (you can find my email in the
git commits). Regarding the future of Dillo, I'm planning to
(finally) do the 3.1 release after some testing, and for that it
would be convenient to have the help of some users to get some
feedback ;-) If you want to contribute, feel free to open a PR or
send a patch (via GitHub or by email, I don't care). Check also the
current issues and pull requests to see what is pending or already
being working on. I will probably setup a mailing list at some
point too. Thanks! Rodrigo.
Author : rodarima
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-01-02 21:55 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dillo-browser.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dillo-browser.github.io)
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Thank you for doing this! Loved Dillo, back in the day
| natas wrote:
| huge huge thanks, I still use Dillo!
| johnklos wrote:
| Very nice!
|
| Dillo is handy to have on lower specced machines. I've used it on
| m68k. I really should see why it doesn't compile on VAX,
| though...
|
| Thanks!
| nu11ptr wrote:
| How does this do at rendering modern websites?
| chx wrote:
| poorly it doesn't even pass acid2
|
| see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126
| rodarima wrote:
| Generally not great, as Dillo doesn't support Javascript and
| most modern sites are using it to create content. But if the
| site degrades well without JS it should render reasonably well.
| Crontab wrote:
| Nice work!!
| mightyham wrote:
| Does dillo support javascript?
| chx wrote:
| nah all scripting is ignored
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Glad to see people are still stepping forward to take care of
| this project. Would love to see Gemini/Gopher support, though
| this is just a crazy idea from the comments section. I have no
| idea how feasible it is.
| jimbosis wrote:
| The Dillo+ (Dillo-Plus) project has already added Gopher and
| Gemini support to their port (they don't use the word fork) of
| Dillo:
|
| https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus
|
| https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus#gopher-and-gemini...
|
| Edit: Newline formatting. Edit 2: Wording (port not fork).
| rodarima wrote:
| This is already supported via plugins, check:
|
| https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n7g%2BJlKZjPV6CRfSQL5YUWk%2BxYg...
| https://github.com/boomlinde/gemini.filter.dpi
| https://celehner.com/projects.html#dillo-plugins
| janice1999 wrote:
| Fantastic work. I remember using Dillo in Puppy Linux from Live
| CDs back in the day.
|
| What's the minimum compiler you target? Any big long term plans?
| Fuzzing? Moving to 'modern' build system like CMake?
| rodarima wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > What's the minimum compiler you target?
|
| I didn't defined any (yet), but shouldn't be too hard to add to
| the CI.
|
| > Any big long term plans?
|
| First preventing it from dying and getting removed from
| distros. Then it depends of how much free time I can dedicate
| to it, but at least maintaining it.
|
| > Fuzzing?
|
| I would say first adding some of the other browser tests
| suites. That should catch a lot of rendering issues. But yeah,
| fuzzing would be interesting, specially for the custom HTML and
| CSS parsers.
|
| > Moving to 'modern' build system like CMake?
|
| Yes, I had to modify the configure.ac and that was very
| painful, specially targeting a lot of platforms. It is also
| broken for cross compilation. I have to check also how is the
| support for cmake in other systems, so we can safely remove
| Automake and friends. But I didn't want to introduce any big
| changes before 3.1 is released.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-02 23:00 UTC)