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Comment by gregsadetsky | Hacker News Reader

`brew install dillo` on Macs (and see [0] for other platforms)

and then `dillo` starts up a 1.1Mb executable that is so freaking, shockingly fast.

TIL I also learned that although the Google homepage renders beautifully, I need to "Turn on JavaScript to keep searching" [1]

Wow, Google Maps is even snarky-ish about it: "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." (that's what appears! for real)

I mean, what was I expecting. U+1F643.

[0] https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/master/doc/insta...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1i3njv0/google_begi...

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Yeah, Google stopped working without JavaScript in the last year (although I believe this is a region-dependent block and may also vary by user agent string)

Yeah, I tried to reach out to Google back when they introduced the JS-wall, but they seem to have an AI chatbot acting as a filter, so I didn't spent much energy.

Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices.

I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Startpage is a good recommendation! I am able to search the web using my browser with startpage. I had tried duckduckgo but have been unable to get past the captcha.

Thanks for the Startpage rec! I've used them in the past but hadn't tried them as a way around Google's JS-wall.

Thanks for Seirdy’s list. It is well maintained https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one/log/master/item/content...

Only several weeks ago was when they broke it for all UAs I could try. If anyone has figured out one that still works, please do tell.

Incidentally, DDG still works without JS.

On the same machine, Google works fine in links, but fails in dillo, seamonkey, firefox without js.

Yes, I have been using

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

for searching in Dillo. Once in a while you may get a captcha from DDG that is far better that any other captcha I have ever seen. The captcha is easy to use and can be a bit fun :)

There's Florb, a client for Open Street Maps written in FLTK, almost like a DIllo's cousin in concept.

Pro: as light as Dillo. Cons: You need OCaml's OMake in order to build it, but DIllo's author it's OFC aware of it and he might migrate the OMakeFile to a single Makefile.

https://github.com/shugaa/florb

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