Haven't got the chance to play around with it, but looks fun. And maybe something cool to use to repackage into an alternative Tor/I2P browser for hidden websites.
What's holding back CSS and HTML support (at their specific versions) and is there interest of expanding that support in full, but lacking resources?
- It is extremely slow and resource intensive. Opening any link/page takes at least 3 seconds on my fastest computer, but the content is mostly text with images.
- It cannot be used without JS (it used to be at least readable, now only the issue description loads). I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself. There are several CLI options but those are no better than just storing the issues as files and using my editor.
- It forces users to create an account to interact and it doesn't interoperate with other forges. It is a walled garden owned by a for-profit corporation.
- You need an Internet connection to use it and a good one. Loading the main page of the dillo repo requires 3 MiB of traffic (compressed) This is more than twice the size of a release of Dillo (we use a floppy disk as limit). Loading our index of all opened issues downloads 7.6 KiB (compressed).
- Replying by email mangles the content (there is no Markdown?).
- I cannot add (built-in) dependencies across issues.
I'll probably write some post with more details when we finally consider the migration complete.
I remember installing Debian on my OLPC XO-1. Dillo and Netsurf were the only browsers that I even tried running on that thing (w. 512MB RAM). Netsurf had better compatibility, but Dillo was noticeably faster and more responsive. Truly a pleasure to use when it supported the site I was on.
I think it is becoming more important to i386 BSD, especially since i386 OpenBSD can no longer build Firefox, Seamonkey and IIRC Chrome on i386 systems.
I have been using dillo more and more as time goes on, plus you can get plugins for Gemini Protocol and Gopher.
Hi there - love Dillo. I use it on NetBSD and it works great. Once you're off GitHub will there be a way to get notified of releases? I use GitHub's RSS feeds for that now.
It fetches the issues from GitHub and stores them in <number>/index.md in Markdown format, with some special headers. I then keep the issues in a git repository:
So we have a very robust storage that we can move around and also allows me to work offline. When I want to push changes, I just push them via git, then buggy(1) runs in the server via a web hook. This also tracks the edit changes.
While typing, I often use `find . -name '*.md' | entr make` which regenerates the issues that have changed into HTML as well as the index, then sends a SIGUSR1 to dillo, which reloads the issue page.
The nice thing of allowing arbitrary HTML inline is that I can write the reproducers in the issue itself:
> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]
Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.
Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.
"High performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat."
If remove ads and behavioural tracking, speed is faster
But goal of Big Tech, who make the popular browsers, is to make speed faster (fast enough) _with_ ads and tracking
User wants fast speed. User does not want ads and tracking. Big Tech wants users in order to target with ads and tracking. Big Tech tries top deliver fast speed to keep users interested
User can achieve fast speed _without_ ads and tracking
I do it every day. I do not use a large propular browser to make HTTP requests nor to read HTML
Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
I did some experiments to pass some tests from WPT, but many of them require JS to perform the check (I was also reading how you do it in blitz). It would probably be the best way forward, so it indicates what is actually supported.
If anyone is interested in a modern take on a lightweight, embeddable web browser / browser engine (that supports features like Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS variables, media queries, etc), then I'm building one over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit.
EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
Mentioning your usage of servo components might help with credibility. You're not starting from scratch.
Edit: to be clear, I consider this a good thing. You've got a head start, are contributing to the ecosystem and aren't doing by yourself something that others have spent billions on.
Yes, we've deliberately tried to make use of existing libraries (either from other browser engines or general purpose libraries) where possible.
The main thing we pull in from Servo (which is also shared with Firefox) is the Stylo CSS engine, which is a really fantastic piece of software (although underdocumented - a situtation I am trying to improve). I was recently able to add support for CSS transitions and animations to Blitz in ~2 days because Stylo supports most of the functionality out of the box.
(the other smaller thing we use from servo is html5ever: the html5/xhtml parser)
We also rely on large parts of the general Rust crate ecosystem: wgpu/vello for rendering (although we now have an abstraction and have added additional Skia and CPU backends), winit for windowing/input, reqwest/hyper/tokio for HTTP, icu4x for unicode, fontations/harfrust for low-level font operations, etc.
And while we're building the layout engine ourselves, we're building it as two independently usable libraries: Taffy for box-level layout (development mostly driven by Blitz but used by Zed and Bevy amongst others), and Parley for text/inline-level layout (a joint effort with the Linebender open source collective).
---
I wish that the Servo project of 2025 was interested in making more of their components available as independent libraries though. Almost all of the independently usable libraries were split out when it was still a Mozilla project. And efforts I have made to try and get Servo developers to collaborate on shared layout/text/font modules have been in vain.
Could this run in Wasm? Even if it was just running it 'headless'? I'm looking something like this to manage layout / animations of text like the DOM to plug into WebGL.
That's a bit of an open question at the moment. The obvious choice from a Rust ecosystem perspective (easiest to integrate) would be Boa (https://boajs.dev/). It has excellent standards conformance, but terrible performance. We'd need to test to what extent that would be an issue in practice.
Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos").
There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal.
I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages.
It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.
How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.
I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either.
But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look.
Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
In 2007 it was moved to Mercurial which I then exported to git when the hg server went down. The history from 2002-2007 was lost (I believe SVN), if someone still has a copy please send it to us. See the missing section:
I used Dillo in 2001-2002 with the PlayStation 2 Linux kit. With 32MB of RAM for Linux, and 4MB for the graphics. It worked really well despite the CPU was 294MHz (MIPS R-5900, two-way in-order CPU, with SIMD unit, and only one hardware thread, having two auxiliary vector units as companions).
Huh, somehow I had the idea that Raph Levien wrote it. The PNG here says corvid, Jeremy Henty, Johannes Hofmann, Jorge Arellano Cid, Rodrigo Arias Mallo (which is presumably you), Sebastian Geerken, and "other".
I just used to use dillo because it was faster, cleaner, and left more RAM free for other uses. If there was a sufficiently broken site that I still wanted to bother loading, I'd fire up whatever the big browser was called back then.
Was a lifesaver to me back in the day, running my frankenstein machine pieced together from useless spares I cobbled together from the computer store I worked at briefly. Every piece of software I ran was trimmed down to the absolute minimum, and it was a time before the web was completely unusuable without an ad blocker. Fond memories of Dillo.
I'm impressed. It runs my dev blog quite well. Some of the CSS alignment is off and it doesn't load web fonts, but it looks basically the same as Chrome. Even the syntax highlighted code snippets work.
Readit News
We are currently in the process of moving Dillo away from GitHub:
- New website (nginx): https://dillo-browser.org/
- Repositories (C, cgit): https://git.dillo-browser.org/
- Bug tracker (C, buggy): https://bug.dillo-browser.org/
They should survive HN hug.
The CI runs on git hooks and outputs the logs to the web (private for now).
All services are very simple and work without JS, so Dillo can be developed fully within Dillo itself.
During this testing period I will continue to sync the GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived.
See also:
- https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046
- https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097
I have poor eyesight, so I can’t read the content.
What's holding back CSS and HTML support (at their specific versions) and is there interest of expanding that support in full, but lacking resources?
- It is extremely slow and resource intensive. Opening any link/page takes at least 3 seconds on my fastest computer, but the content is mostly text with images.
- It cannot be used without JS (it used to be at least readable, now only the issue description loads). I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself. There are several CLI options but those are no better than just storing the issues as files and using my editor.
- It forces users to create an account to interact and it doesn't interoperate with other forges. It is a walled garden owned by a for-profit corporation.
- You need an Internet connection to use it and a good one. Loading the main page of the dillo repo requires 3 MiB of traffic (compressed) This is more than twice the size of a release of Dillo (we use a floppy disk as limit). Loading our index of all opened issues downloads 7.6 KiB (compressed).
- Replying by email mangles the content (there is no Markdown?).
- I cannot add (built-in) dependencies across issues.
I'll probably write some post with more details when we finally consider the migration complete.
I think it is becoming more important to i386 BSD, especially since i386 OpenBSD can no longer build Firefox, Seamonkey and IIRC Chrome on i386 systems.
I have been using dillo more and more as time goes on, plus you can get plugins for Gemini Protocol and Gopher.
https://dillo.org/post-sitemap.xml
At some point I should investigate if we can fill a complaint to get it taken down at least. Here is more info: https://dillo-browser.org/dillo.org.html
https://git.dillo-browser.org/buggy/
It fetches the issues from GitHub and stores them in <number>/index.md in Markdown format, with some special headers. I then keep the issues in a git repository:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/
So we have a very robust storage that we can move around and also allows me to work offline. When I want to push changes, I just push them via git, then buggy(1) runs in the server via a web hook. This also tracks the edit changes.
While typing, I often use `find . -name '*.md' | entr make` which regenerates the issues that have changed into HTML as well as the index, then sends a SIGUSR1 to dillo, which reloads the issue page.
The nice thing of allowing arbitrary HTML inline is that I can write the reproducers in the issue itself:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/tree/501/index.md#n...
Closing an issue is just changing the header "State: open" by "State: closed", often with a comment pointing to the merged commit.
That said I wish there was something a little better than cgit
Dead Comment
> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]
Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.
Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.
[1] https://dillo-browser.github.io/
If remove ads and behavioural tracking, speed is faster
But goal of Big Tech, who make the popular browsers, is to make speed faster (fast enough) _with_ ads and tracking
User wants fast speed. User does not want ads and tracking. Big Tech wants users in order to target with ads and tracking. Big Tech tries top deliver fast speed to keep users interested
User can achieve fast speed _without_ ads and tracking
I do it every day. I do not use a large propular browser to make HTTP requests nor to read HTML
Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
I did some experiments to pass some tests from WPT, but many of them require JS to perform the check (I was also reading how you do it in blitz). It would probably be the best way forward, so it indicates what is actually supported.
There are options here for (my setup below):
geometry=1600x900
increase font_factor=1.75
bg_color=0xFAF9F6
Start and Home pages too.
Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit.
EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
Edit: to be clear, I consider this a good thing. You've got a head start, are contributing to the ecosystem and aren't doing by yourself something that others have spent billions on.
The main thing we pull in from Servo (which is also shared with Firefox) is the Stylo CSS engine, which is a really fantastic piece of software (although underdocumented - a situtation I am trying to improve). I was recently able to add support for CSS transitions and animations to Blitz in ~2 days because Stylo supports most of the functionality out of the box.
(the other smaller thing we use from servo is html5ever: the html5/xhtml parser)
We also rely on large parts of the general Rust crate ecosystem: wgpu/vello for rendering (although we now have an abstraction and have added additional Skia and CPU backends), winit for windowing/input, reqwest/hyper/tokio for HTTP, icu4x for unicode, fontations/harfrust for low-level font operations, etc.
And while we're building the layout engine ourselves, we're building it as two independently usable libraries: Taffy for box-level layout (development mostly driven by Blitz but used by Zed and Bevy amongst others), and Parley for text/inline-level layout (a joint effort with the Linebender open source collective).
---
I wish that the Servo project of 2025 was interested in making more of their components available as independent libraries though. Almost all of the independently usable libraries were split out when it was still a Mozilla project. And efforts I have made to try and get Servo developers to collaborate on shared layout/text/font modules have been in vain.
If you were running it "headless" (which is supported), then it would probably work today.
There would also be the option of using Taffy and/or Parley (the layout libraries) without the rest of Blitz.
Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos").
There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages.
It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.
But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look.
Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.1.0/commits-author.png
The initial release was around the 15th of December, 1999. It's going to be 26 years ago: https://dillo-browser.org/25-years/index.html
It's good to see that it's active again!
IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.
Deleted Comment
https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03
Some may consider that to be a feature