My Other Favourite Web Browser (Dillo)

2024-10-22

Some bastard has been setting off fireworks for the past few days. Who the fuck sets of fireworks when it's still light outside? I really hate fireworks, they're too loud and they spook me. I got so frustrated that 2 days ago I yelled out of my window to tell him to stop. I can just about see over the rows of fences enough to peep the top of this individual's head as they go out to set off another one. At this point it's just bizarre, fireworks are fairly expensive are they not? Who has the money and desire to do this? The loud crack of a firework pulls me out of whatever I'm doing every time. Since it's not a predictable regular pattern, I can't prepare myself for the next explosion and they give me a mini jump-scare every time. I hate this motherfucker who is setting off fireworks in my neighbourhood.

Ok on with this post.

The dillo web browser is overlooked. I think this is a shame. It functions as a stopgap, midway between pure text based browsers like w3m or Lynx, and full featured graphical browsers Chrome and Firefox. Dillo is nestled in the middle, minimal enough to run blazing fast even on old computers (runs great on my ThinkPad x60s with 3gb ram and a low power cpu), it doesn't support modern features like javascript or iframes. But it's still very much a graphical program, it will correctly render css and background images of webpages (if you tell it to, and also as long as they are embedded within the html file of the webpage. It doesn't like externally linked stylesheets for some reason.)

Dillo has a highly customisable dillorc configuration file, and while the customisation doesn't reach as far as something like qutebrowser allows, it's still versatile enough to tweak to your liking, changing the browser's behaviour, modifying keybinds etc.

This is the dillo website https://dillo-browser.github.io/. Note that it is NOT http://dillo.org, that website is no longer under the control of the developers. You can read more about that here. Firstly let me compliment the design of this new website. Very much to my tastes. We can see that dillo even has plugins which add support for gemini, gopher, ipfs, spartan, and even man pages. Now, I will say I've tried using dillo for browsing these alternative protocols and to be honest, it's not as good as some of their respective dedicated browsers. The thing is, gemini and gopher and stuff, they don't need a special low power version of a browser to make them work better, since they're already so minimal. I've found that dillo is best for web browsing, without the bullshit.

I really don't have much else to say about dillo. I like it because it fills a specific niche. I like it because it isn't just a reskin of chrome or firefox. I like it because it explicitly doesn't support bloat. I like it because it allows old machines to have a fast graphical web browser. Is it actually usable as a daily driver? No. But it's still useful, and it's still cool. It does break a lot of websites. Ok maybe I'm playing defence just because I think it's cool. But it is kinda cool though.