Dillo: A Tiny Graphical Web Browser
dillo.org
dillo.org
Back then a browser was just another application on your computer, almost like a calculator something. It was just a tool. Now the web browser is probably the most complex bit of software on your computer. Crazy how far things have come in the past 20 years.
Also it is great to see FLTK in use, it is a nice little toolkit albeit not the prettiest :)
At least we finally have a system that is multiplatform- but my web browser is seriously hungry, added to that most websites dictate how they will display their information to me- I seem to get less choice year on year. (and yes, I know I can plug my browser full of add-ons which give me back some control, but if JS doesn't run for instance, I don't even see the page in many cases, and this serves to increase how hungry the browser is)
Yet you say you miss native apps, which absolutely dictate everything about how they work?
They let you change colours, typefaces and shapes slightly. You could do that with Windows 1.
That's not the same as what CSS allows (complete reconfiguration).
I live in the land of UNIX and commandline, I was not talking about GUI applications. But I see why you interpreted it that way, I apologise.
* CLI tools present in my terminal's specified fonts and colours. Near total control. The main exceptions are ANSI escapes, and even those I can limit to black-and-white -- usually normal, bold, and reverse-video.
* Most desktop apps integrate into some desktop enviornment (or environment(s)) for font size(s), colours, etc. OSX is actually something of an exception, which I realised when trying to see how I might set that up for a visually disabled friend.
* Even where desktop apps don't have systemwide configuration tools, you're generally seeing the same toolkit (or limited set of toolkits) in use. Most of the experience is highly uniform.
* Straight-up text presentation is typically quite good. Far superior to Web tools.
Sure there are some desktop apps which suck as much as their web alternatives (Outlook for email is a great example) but overall I would much rather work with a dozen desktop apps than a dozen web services.
And then all of the other things you mentioned come into play such as code signing, no control over updates which might break my process, etc.
> and they have shoddy tools
I don't intend to argue with you, but my personal experience is one of discovering recently that javascript is a decent language and the browser dev tools, especially Chrome, are bigger and better than most of the C++ dev tools I've ever used. And they come with the browser, no crazy developer packages to install, and you can always debug on anyone's machine anywhere.
It is true that web developers usually have to make browser specific adjustments, but its fairly minor these days, an occasional polyfill you can find online, and I don't think this even compares, not even a little, to the issues you have to deal with when writing native cross-platform code (mac/win/linux).
I'm less happy that everyone treats their webpage as an app, and thus crams it full of huge amounts of code, when really they're mostly serving text and images, with only little bits of javascript needed.
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/screenshots/
[1] if not lower... I can't time it, but to describe it I'd say, rendering is done when the Return key is up. Seriously nice.
Most of the websites work, but are visually broken. Google seems to be working okay.
But the speed is super. It is like Firefox, Chrome and IE are these big slow monsters and Dillo is the little hero running around them.
Dillo shows pages, other process them.
It does not work for "apps", but to read documents (the initial purpose of the web), it's excellent.
http://www.dillo.org/FAQ.html#q12
> First of all, beware that this is a prototype in alpha state. It will only provide for very basic web page retrievals, POST and GET. There is no certificate caching and NO AUTHENTICATION performed.
> It's disabled by default.
In my mind that's a pretty big defect.
I'd like to see a speed comparison.
A browser where you disable JS, CSS and images, you'd hope may be smart enough to not fetch or process unneeded assets.
I have a 1.4mb connection at home, and many sites are painful to use, to the point I just don't bother. Because of lavish asset loading - with advertising etc.
Most of my web reading is suspended to the future: add to queue -> process page to text -> send to e-reader, partly as it's more comfortable, and also because of sluggishness in sites/pages.
On faster connections/faster computers it's less of a pain. Mobile is generally a world of pain (for me at least)!
At the moment it's as boring as a readability bookmarklet. That then sends the parsed html to a free kindle address. Readability will accept urls to process in emails. But this doesn't work for me. I forget why. Also readability sometimes borks and I never get the page. And sometimes readability can't read something. It just comes out blank. Probably a JS heavy page or something. Managing readability archives and searching through them isn't that great. I'm not really a fan of the readability web browser interface. I haven't tried the apps. But it does the job for free so I mustn't grumble.
I'd rather email/bookmark links, to process later, to then read at my leisure. And also text index them. Something to improve searching. Also the ability to rate or summarise what I've read.
I get articles that upon reading, I don't like. So chaff does get through. I could do with applying feedback. Flagging bad (as in I don't like) sites, bad authors etc. One problem is that I can't do the feedback there and then from my e-reader when I'm in the moment. But actually it might be a good re-enforcment tactic to come back and evaluate later. It would be nice to then share good reads.
An email address for reads is good, as you can always ask others to send you stuff. Or perhaps forward an email containing a link to your reading address.
I have cognitive difficulty reading from a browser, but am fine with e-ink. Plus it doesn't require an internet connection. It's comfortable. I do tend to neglect my book reading though, which is a bit of a shame. Oh and I have a mountain of articles to read, currently about 1200.
With what comes through with readability, sometimes the author is missing. Probably meta data missing. And not having dates and other meta data available can be annoying. Having a datestamp of when I bookmarked it for reading might be nice.
#!/bin/sh
curl -- $@ | pandoc --standalone --smart -T '' -o - -f html -t epub
Pandoc parses the html, converts the parts it can to its internal document model and converts this into EPUB. It doesn't do any intentional stripping, but some things get thrown out because it is not part of its document model.
Pandoc is not a single purpose application, but rather the document format swiss-army knife. [0]
Their change log is quite comprehensive:
http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/file/tip/ChangeLog
Refreshingly for me, they have tried to do a lot of documentation, which can be found here:
That's what I used at home for the last ~4 years. But At my work I was using Ubuntu and Windows in my last job. In current job (~5 months) I was given a Dell laptop initially on which I had set up Elementary and after some time I was given a Macbook Pro. So that's how I changed. Also, Elementary wouldn't be called stable really (and they don't claim so) - till few months ago at least, I still liked it.
They should definitely rename to avoid further confusion (not to mention the false sense of hope).
Seems reasonable, not like it's called "the gimp" or something. Perhaps it's from "armadillo"?
Finding a suitable web browser with reasonable support for "modern" web standards (basically CSS2) and a lightweight footprint was terribly hard... the better ones, as I remember them, were:
1) Dillo[2], which was one of the most lightweight graphical browsers under active development, albeit a bit light on features as well... FLTK is a great toolkit, and runs well on resource-starved devices like the ones mentioned above.
2) Netsurf[3], a relative newcomer, had one of the best rendering engines out there considering its lightweight footprint. It too is under active development, and is moving towards HTML5 and CSS3 compatibility. Has GTK2 and framebuffer backends, the last of which is better in terms of memory footprint.
3) Konqueror-Embedded[4], which hasn't seen development since the mid-2000s, was actually the only browser with reasonable support for web standards and support for Javascript. Built against QT2 (which is a massive chore in itself), it runs fast and has a low memory footprint.
4) Links-hacked[5], which again hasn't seen any development in more than 10 years, worked pretty well in graphical mode. It's a mix between elinks code (before Javascript support was gutted out) and links2 code (for the graphical parts).
Some failed experiments were:
Firefox version 1.0.8, last release with GTK 1.2 support, was, unfortunately, too slow to run in any reasonable way. Startup time was around 1:30 minutes on the HP Jornada, and navigating to any web-page took more than 3 minutes.
Hv3[6], a browser and engine built in TCL/TK, looked promising but was a nightmare to compile and never worked correctly.
Finding modern software that can run well in such memory-constrained enviroment was hard enough, let alone something as complex as a web rendering engine.
[0]: https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-vargtass [1]: https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-muffinman [2]: http://www.dillo.org/ [3]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ [4]: https://konqueror.org/embedded/ [5]: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/ [6]: http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html
Bootstrap this : https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
And then it's as easy as : pkgin install dillo
pkgin avail | grep browser>[currently broken]