Sad to see small browsers go. They are very convenient for a quick read of simple HTML websites, as they start instantly and are very fast, as they usually do not support JavaScript. Good that NetSurf seems to be chugging along with minor updates in git, albeit there were no release for two years...
Would love to see a macOS build of NetSurf. It's supported in theory but there's nobody doing builds currently so it probably requires a bit of finagling to actually get done. I tried to do it myself but I just wasn't smart enough.
I have a lot of respect for Dillo. It uses the FLTK, and is the very definition of "non-bloat". The real problem is that nearly all website render terribly. It just can't keep up with the complexity that it the modern web. It's a real shame.
Lately I have become interested in the older protocols like Gopher, and some of the bulletin boards. There are some recent protocols that address the complexity of the web: Gemini and Spartan (which is Gemini without TLS, basically).
+1, it is also a joy to customize via the well-documented config file. E.g. adding custom search operators is very straightforward and flexible. With some unix-y thinking, one could probably also accomplish some other useful tricks on the address bar, simply by writing a string substitution one-liner into the rc file. Compare that to about:config, Add-ons, etc. Ha.
I somehow also very much enjoyed the not-so-good rendering. One may get used to it, I guess; even become fond of it -- you'll become more focused on the content/text and less on the layout. YMMW, but I always disabled all CSS and images. Also, I only recently (after roughly a decade of Dillo usage) noticed the --fullwindow (-f) command line option. This gives an extremely nice HTML renderer that loads in a second.
I've been curious about the tiny Picolisp language, which, IIRC, uses localhost-bound HTML as its default GUI (1,2). Sending Picolisp commands from a terminal window to a --fullwindowed Dillo instance would make a very cool environment.
Dillo is lightweight, modular, one-thing-well. Extremely user-friendly, simple to tailor to one's needs. A project that has managed to avoid bloat for 22 years. Unix philosophy at its best. Also, the executable is 872kb. Compare that to, uh, some other browsers.
It is probably my all time favorite browser for the X environment.
Even if one finds its HTML capabilities lacking (I don't; I see it as a feature, not a bug), then maybe, thanks to the plugin architecture, it would make a nice renderer for e.g. Gemini.
Oh wow, I hadn't heard of Spartan, but it looks like what I'm after. Gemini is interesting, but I didn't like how TLS and Unicode rules out a lot of old retro machines from being able to access it.
Looks like Spartan is already supported by the excellent Lagrange [1] Gopher/Gemini browser from v1.13 onwards, so I'm happy to discover this! Thanks for sharing!
Glad you found it useful. You don't have to use unicode if you don't want to, of course. Spartan uses the same gemtext format that Gemini does. A big appeal to me is that it's easier to write gemtext files that gophermaps. Gophermaps feel like a kludge in comparison.
The cool thing about something like Spartan is that you could implement a browser on a microcontroller. HTML would be a lost cause. Imagine something like an ESP32 with a touch-screen. You could create a complete browsing device for less than 25 quid, say. Likewise for gopher.
If I may be permitted a small plug, I have a forked version of the bombadillo browser here:
https://gitlab.com/mcturra2000/bombadillo
You can use it on a terminal. It allows you to browse Spartan, which the original does not. It also allows a printing facility, so that you can pipe output to another process.
I am happy this all works for you, but be aware that my (and many other peoples') first language requires me to use UTF-8 and after years of struggling I must say yay, utf is great!
> The real problem is that nearly all website render terribly. It just can't keep up with the complexity that it the modern web. It's a real shame.
I was thinking since quite a while now to write a wrapper around the Serenity OS browser [1] that supports JS, CSS and WASM, and passes ACID 3 tests [2].
I did have a quick look at the source, but couldn't think of a nice way to wrap it as it's quite closely tied to the Serenity OS GUI.
You're in luck, Andreas has been hacking on that since a couple of months. They're calling the Linux version of the browser Ladybird: https://github.com/awesomekling/ladybird
The sad thing is having a pure web browser that intermixes correctly, perhaps something that uses tabbed, surf, and a dillo/luakit based thing for true "browser" support, browser in this case meaning: "supports more than http/https/html".
This is why I prefer the projects, at least the small ones, don't try to maintain a domain of their own. Sooner or later the domain will not be renewed, by mistake, loss of interest in maintaining infrastructure, or because the domain holder passes away, etc.
I'm not a software engineer, just an unix-minded end-user, but I've always seen this sort of consistency as very good, thoughtful engineering. Having an almost unchanged GUI for 20+ years is an indicator of well thought out defaults early on, I suppose.
Similar projects that come to mind are mhwaveedit and mtPaint (the latter was inspired by the former, /1, 2). I need to do audio work, so mhwaveedit is a gem that, for me, has replaced Audacity almost entirely. Blazing fast, with a consistent, extremely well thought out GUI again.
Eric S. Raymond used Audacity as an example of great unix-y GUI design in "The Art of Unix Programming". I've often thought, that, by now, Audacity somewhat suffers from "feature creep", including GUI-wise. mhwaveedit has managed to escape adding features.
Quoting a passage grom TAOUP: "Several features of this UI are subtly excellent and worthy of emulation /.../. But these are details. The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible." /3
I'd say Dillo managed to maintain the same core idea in terms of web browsing, have as few barriers between the user and the HTML file as possible. No added bloat, for 22 consecutive years. This is quite remarkable, actually -- as compared to GUI (and other) changes of many other browsers. Obviously, the scope of those "other browser projects" is different as well; it's a different world.
Also, possibly the consistency of the GUI has to do with the use of FLTK, which kind of forces the devs to focus on the bare essentials.
Let's hope that these indications of Dillo's death (because no homepage) are greatly exaggerated. Greetings and a thousand thanks thus far to all of Dillo's devs!
That sucks, I have a weird fascination with Dillo. It didn’t really seem like it was going anywhere, but still, it was nice knowing that it was out there.
Downloading Dillo
Dillo is following an evolving software model where every new version shall be better than the previous one; there's no place for unstable releases, so just keep up with the latest one: dillo-3.0.5[0]
I've found it inspirational. (Also they provided all the previous versions, just for case).
( Also I believe that virtually every software gets worse and worse and worse with time, I usually go for the first versions. )
