The Dillo web browser is a very fast, extremely small Web browser that’s completely written in C. The source and binary are less than 400 kilobytes each. It is a graphical browser built upon GTK+, and it renders a good subset of HTML, excluding frames, JavaScript, and JVM support. On version 0.8, the dpi framework was redesigned. Communications are now done with a daemon: dpid. Some new plugins are included: downloads, ftp, hello. On other browser news……Opera is set to go public at the end of March, while we, here at OSNews, have designed a (static for now) test page of the next generation front-end of OSNews for mobile/text web browsers. Please visit it with your mobile browser and send us feedback and/or screenshots of how it renders on your device. Minimum requirements for the new mobile version of OSNews is 120×120 pixels and an HTML 3.x web browser (though most mobile phones fail to provide even that unfortunately). WAP is here, just in case.
Dillo 0.8 Released; Opera Goes Public; New OSNews Mobile front-end
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Woo-hoo! My favorite help browser is updated. I love Dillo for things like that. The program starts in a second and as long as you don’t need fancy fonts, frames, flash, &c., it works great.
Just wish it’d work with application/xhtml+xml. My homepage uses that, and I can’t seem to get it to render.
Oh, and I’ll do the inevitable “wish there was a gtk2 version blah blah blah” that every Dillo thread needs.
Looks like Gnome will soon have a new default browser =).
Dillo is more suitable for PDAs than anything else.
Hi
maybe this can be ported to C64+SCPU unix like OS, Wings OS (http://wings.webhop.org), as it has a C compiler.
Dillo works with slashdot now!
http://www.dillo.org/screenshots/slashdot1.png
It never did before. The dillo devs were saying that Slashcode was producing broken HTML, so Dillo would not display it. I wonder who cracked first?
Just had to go around the new problems found on Dillo 0.8. It seems that Dillo can’t handle tags closing out of order. While this is *not* correct HTML of course, it is necessary sometimes. In our case, if we were to close the </FORM> inside a TD (the form opened inside a TD), it will create an ugly unwanted paragraph on that TD, even if you never asked for it, with IE and older Netscapes. The “trick” webmasters are doing to go around this IE/netscape bug, is to close the </FORM> outside of the table, so it doesn’t create that ugly effect (still seen here with Dillo 0.8: http://www.osnews.com/phorum/ — didn’t fix it on our Phorum pages). Problem is, this trick breaks Dillo which can’t handle out of order closing of tags (previous Dillo versions could deal with it).
Same happens with FONT and B/I/U tags.
Frank put a screenshot of OSNews’ new mobile front end here: http://theqtopian.net/modules/news/ running Opera on his Zaurus. Looks great, thanks Frank!
Seriously, who picked the name for this project?
You can test Opera Small-Screen Rendering? by pressing [shift]+F11 when using Opera (>6?), then you’ll get a nice look on how it feels to browse with a cellphone.
Ok, I compiled it, apparently it’s fast. I am trying to find “Options”; how do I access it? I am trying to change the startup page; I can’t find “options”; it’s not under “File” menu.
The fact that Opera is going public made me decide not to use their browser for general browsing again, as I generally think it’s bad for a company to be public. Opera has always been independant to me, they’ve done their thing and they did it well. Now that is going to change as they will have more responibility for making fast money.
Add to that, that their desktop webbrowser has fallen behind recently. It’s slower and more unstable than it used to be. It also has a more cluttered interface.
I think their time on the desktops is over, and they’ll move over more and more to mobile devices and leave desktop Opera for the developers to use.
I’m going over to Firefox and I won’t be looking back. Thanks for some good years Opera.
For a mobile device, size matters because the transfer speed is usually low. There’s a lot of font-tags, center-tags, class=non and width=100%. This could be eliminated by using CSS. By putting all the CSS in an external file, you could also avoid downloading the same file each time.
Example:
by writing table {width: 100%} in your CSS, you get the same results as by writing TD WIDTH=”100% for every line.
Similar changes could be done to remove CENTER, FONT etc.
I don’t know who picked it, but I do know it’s short for “armadillo.”
And I doubt the name sounds like what you’re thinking of in Spanish (the head developer is Chilean.)
>This could be eliminated by using CSS
I am sorry, but it doesn’t work this way in real life. The mobile version of osnews also targets textmode browsers, Playstation/Dreamcast browsers, T-Mobile’s Hiptop, AvantGo, really old amiga/other browsers and all sorts of *weird* things.
Hence, CSS is out of the question. I do have a bit of CSS in the mobile version, but only when they don’t break/change other browsers).
Please don’t start the same conversation again, I have explained all that stuff in the past. Most mobile browsers can’t handle such CSS or XHTML stuff. It HAS to be good, old, tradtional HTML 3.x and remember, osnews’ goal is to render everywhere, even on old buggy browsers. Our design goal is to reach as many people as possible, not to get any w3c awards for our “validated markup” (we care about rendering everywhere, and the market’s realities does not make it compatible with being “validated”).
hi
“not to get any w3c awards for our “validated markup” (we care about rendering everywhere, and the market’s realities does not make it compatible with being “validated”).”
validation is not for winning awards. if every browser follows it properly mozilla and konqueror wouldnt have to mimic ie on every faulty web page.
writing a browser for valid web page is easy. writing an ie clone is hard
please try to maintain your web page as much validated as you can instead of ridiculing standards
Taking a look over modern mobile browser specs a little while ago, many seamed to be going xhtml only route. It is easyer to validate and thus render correctly.
(but for wide over-all (not just mobile) support, having a 3. version is a good thing(tm). )
Yeah, but we don’t only support these XHTML browsers. We support text mode browsers and other stuff too, so as I said, we will stick with HTML 3.2. It does the JOB.
>please try to maintain your web page as much validated you can
WE ARE. We try to be as close to the standards as we can. Our HTML *is* as *simple* as it can get to make sure it renders everywhere. On the way, we might need to break a few rules in order to be able to render on such mobile-buggy browsers, but overall, we make sure that the final outcome IS acceptable by every browser.
Please stop this conversation about validation/CSS/XHTML. We have discussed this to death in the past. We are doing the best job we can in order to make sure we can reach as many readers as it is possible, in a way that is both simple, clean and as less ugly as possible.
http://zone.ee/myzz/dillo/0.8.0/dillo-0.8.0-mzz.html
OS News is also viewable with this patch
In my opinion, HTML authoring and rendering should follow the old recommendation for email servers: be strict in what you send, and liberal in what you accept.
Writing invalid code, in the long run, is asking for trouble because you become dependent on a particular strategy of error correction. In theory, new versions of browsers should have the same or better support for established standards – and that’s what’s happened with IE, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera. But there’s no official way for a browser to handle errors in HTML, so a new browser version is more likely to break an invalid layout than a valid one.
Of course, since there is so much broken HTML out there, it is necessary for a browser to try to puzzle it out instead of throwing up its figurative hands. This has its challenges, though. Dave Hyatt wrote a series of posts on Surfin’ Safari ( http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_01.html#004702 ) last month. They were focused on XML error handling, but gave the example of how difficult it’s been for the Safari developers to try to match the way IE handles HTML coding errors.
So on one hand, I agree with you: Dillo should try to handle broken HTML better than it does. On the other hand, I think that finding a solution that uses valid – or at least well-formed – code will cause you fewer headaches in the long run.
Looks good here on iPAQ 5455 PPC2003. No problems what so ever and looks good.
dillo is soooo fast !
It is even faster as lynx/links!
I recommend really everyone to try it out. It’s nice then u want to read news, or want to *fast* browse the net.
Is dillo faster or has more features than links2 (graphic) or chimera? I am looking for a ligth graphic web browser for small computers.
I don’t know about links2, but unless new development on chimera has started up, Dillo has vastly more features than chimera. I remember thinking chimera was way behind the times back in ’99, and I can’t find anything newer than the version I was using back then.
Looks good on my BlackBerry 7230. I love that it has more content rather than just the top 15 headlines as the current WAP site does.
>Looks good on my BlackBerry 7230
Thanks. Can you please find out the Blackberry’s user agent browser string so I can add it to our list of mobile browsers? (because when the dynamic version goes live we might not have support for it without its user agent in our code)
If you don’t know how to find out the Blackberry’s user agent, please email me and I will put up a page where it can grab that string.
Looking at my stats:
BlackBerryWWWW/X.Y.Z
i.e.
BlackBerry7230/3.7.1
BlackBerry6750/3.7.1
…someone invented NetPostive on another platform!
Mike
Will frames support be added? It isn’t very useful without it/
Wow – What a nice surprise that osnews keeps looking great in dillo ! As Eugenia hinted pre-0.8 versions had trouble with osnews. But since I’m late with my comment I won’t restart the spec discussion.
@cheezwog and slashdot : slashdot looked good a few months (a year ??) ago, but at some point slashcode changed and it broke the rendering.
@X and options : Click on the “help” link on the splash screen.
@anonymous and frames: yes, frames will be supported – eventually. Search the mailing list archives to find out the details, patches etc.
It’s small and fast. that’s it…
[i]Seriously, who picked the name for this project?<i/>
“Dillo” in italian means “Say it!”
Mine says “BlackBerry7230/3.7.0”. So, from mlk’s comment I learn two things:
1. Just check user-agent for “BlackBerry” at the beginning of the string.
2. There may be an upgrade availble for my BlackBerry
Just two screenshots of osnews/mobile.html I did on my Palm Tungsten T3 using builtin WebPro 3.01
http://raven.oook.cz/osnews-1.png
http://raven.oook.cz/osnews-2.png
I know I probably speak for myself, but I’m not interested in another browser that only partially supports W3C standards.
I’m sticking with Firefox (the browser formerly known as Firebird… uh, Phoenix…) because it seems to have the most support for XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, and ECMAScript. It also handles PNGs properly (IE6 on Windows certainly doesn’t); if/when they add proper SVG support, it’ll have unstoppable powa!
– chrish
Not to sound like a jackass, but the “But… but… STANDARDS!” posts say one thing to me: “I have not done commercial web development.” My former employee had pretty much one rule which all sites we developed had to comply with: it must render properly in Netscape 3 (this was ca. 1999/2000). To do otherwise would have been equivalent of saying: “Here’s your advertisment Mr. Client… oh, and it won’t show properly on 30% of the TV sets out there. Oh, and here’s your invoice.”
Things are different now, admittedly, with IE being used by something near 95% web surfers out there – but consider the purpose of this site. IMO, it would be plainly idiotic to have a site that covers news about (among other things) older alternative OSes like BeOS, Amiga, et all… but wouldn’t be able to render in the browsers that ship for those OSes.
Jebus. It’s not exactly as if OSNews was built in MS Word and has assloads of IE-specific “mso” styles saturating it.
_Exactly_!! Thansk Stephen!
been using dillo for several years now. love it.
when i dont need some advanced stuff i find with firefox, i use dillo all the time
I have an old laptop that has limited ram. When i need to use it to browse the web graphically, I use dillo…. works beautifully. Keep up the good work guys!