The Dillo web browser
Back to The Web
I’m currently experimenting with making Dillo a daily driver. As of this moment, I’ve only lightly explored the keyboard shortcuts and such.
The real website for Dillo is: https://dillo-browser.org/
They have migrated (or are migrating) away from Microslop GitHub to a cgit instance. Good for them!
I’m a huge fan of these project goals (quoting directly from the website):
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Lower the barrier of entry to the web.
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Support old or small machines and slow connections.
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Personal security and privacy.
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High software efficiency.
What really impresses me about Dillo is that it renders HTML and CSS very well. I was shocked when I loaded my website and every page looks exactly the same as it does in the Big Complexity browsers.
Dillo is super fast and tiny (for a web browser!)
No JavaScript
The biggest thing about Dillo is that it doesn’t run JS. Which, right there, eliminates the bulk of modern browser security and privacy issues.
I’m sure it’s possible to do something nefarious with Dillo, but it’s gonna be a heck of a lot harder. And there are so few of us surfing with it that it’s an extremely unlikely terget.
Oh, and I’m a web developer by trade, so you don’t have to expend a single precious moment of your life trying to convince me that the modern web platform is the perhaps greatest computing gift and curse we’ve ever had. I’m fine with opening up LibreWolf when I need to use a JS application.
Perhaps the biggest bonus of not running JavaScript is that it makes my usual distractions on the web nearly impossible. For example, (most?) social media sites do absolutely nothing if you don’t have JS running.
Looking up programming resources and word definitions very rarely require JS. (But first, you gotta find the good websites. They’re out there!!!)
Funny? aside
An amusing opposite situation just occurred to me: I have another browser that I never "surf the web" with. And no, it’s not Lynx the text mode browser. It’s the copy of Google Chrome with no plugins that I need to use at work to test our SaaS product.
Dillo doesn’t render a lot of distracting stuff on websites because it can’t. But Chrome makes reading websites unbearable because it renders everything. I will occasionally look up programming documentation in that browser, but everything else is, in my opinion, completely unusable with all of the popups, auto-playing videos, and flashing garbage everywhere. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I genuinely don’t know how people put up with that it makes me a little sad that they do.