The little browser is back.
Although they are now on version 3.2.0; Verison 3.1.0 of Dillo was brought back to life by a developer by the name of Rodrigo Arias Mallo in 2024 with the first release adding SSL support to this browser. Dillo born in 1999 which is right at the Dot-com explosion of browsers and ways for people to access the internet. Dillo was ultra-light weight and had minimalistic features that at the time were not required on the internet. In fact, back when we were playing with RedHat Linux. Dillo was included in distros because we were loading it on old machines, like a 486 as an example. And for as limiting as that may be to launch a browser on a 25Mhz CPU. Dillo responded very well back in its day.
Want to check it out yourself? The actual website is here at https://dillo-browser.github.io/ .
Would you like to know more? Read onwards into the downward spiral!
Present day.
The landscape of the so-called modern internet has changed over the course of 26 years, with not all of it being good.
If you're rocking a chromium based browser, all that one really has to do to confirm how fucked the internet is getting is press "F12" on your keyboard to open up the developer panel, click on the "Network" tab and then type in www(dot)cnn(dot)com. Depending on your internet speeds, the amount of bandwidth it takes to open up just the front page on this news agencies website is like downloading a typical application for an operating system. Most of this isn't even coming from the news agency itself. It's all advertisers and third party sites that really provide no content to you the end-user and are mostly there just to monitor what you do.
Technology however does evolve. We aren't looking at twelve to fourteen-inch CRT monitors anymore with resolutions of 800x600 or 1024x768. Thus, to hold onto 1999 standards in 2025 but expect modern results is unreasonable. Images do get bigger and multiply based off of their resolutions. Which is why a graphically rich website will of course consume more bandwidth than a minimalistic text-based only website. This is something we fight with ourselves when building a website and continue to do so to this very day.
Of course, just thinking about the basics HTML which is text and media is just the starting point of many websites out there. Eventually you get into a degree of scripting and programming, which is good for a user experience but potentially harmful if optimization is your key.
This of course brings up another not-so-great aspect of being in 2025. That you could say there are a lot of browsers to choose from. But the reality of the situation is few of the alternative browsers are really built from the ground up. They're simply "Forks" of other browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is no longer on here because Microsoft Edge Chromium with a different coat of paint. Opera used to have its own base code but also gave up and went with Chromium as well. Even the browser we're using to write this article which is LibreWolf is just a fork of Mozilla's Firefox with extra security considerations added.
This of course creates a bit of a problem. Which is the browsers, the very way the average person uses the internet can be manipulated by one of these incredibly large platforms. Especially with Chromium holding an overwhelmingly large percentage of browser usage over Mozilla and Apples Safari.
Overtime, we've lost a lot of browsers. Which is why we wanted to write about Dillo. The development team is tiny for it. So we're not expecting miracles from being on hiatus for 9 years.
Present time.
H'okay! You may be hyped to try it out on your system. So you go to their website to download this app, and you get something like this.
Hoo boy. You devs are really bringing us back to 1990 aren't you?
Essentially, they are insisting that you compile it yourself. Depending on how you look at this could be a bad thing or a good thing.
The Good - Everything is obviously open source. The developer wants YOU to compile it for whatever OS you are on and run from there. Inviting others who know how to compile to possible help assist in coding.
The bad - Your average gamer, internet user, etc. will probably click on this section. Get super confused and walk away. This in itself may be OKAY because there are groups on the internet that are absolutely vicious when it comes to emerging programs. Just ask the Nintendo 64 emulation devs that one.
A little source code isn't going to scare us!
Thus, with Ubuntu 24.04.2 loaded onto our T620 from a blog earlier. This system is a 1.5Ghz Quad Core processor, which means it's on the minimum requirements for modern browsers. We souped up the RAM a little from last time, and we gave it a 500GB SATA drive, but realistically that's all we did to this bad boy. Oh, we also switched from Wayland to XFCE. The desktop that comes with Ubuntu is pretty as fuck, and we're sure the MAC OSX crowd would dig it. But given our limited GPU and us actually caring about performance. We're willing to give that up and migrate over to XFCE just fine.
Alright, so if it's perfect code. I should be able to do the following
cd ~/Dillo-installation sudo ./configure sudo make install
And we're good right? Right?
Nope!
Like all things Linux. Dependencies are of course required. This would be super nice to know in advance on their GitHub page on the basics on installation. After reading the configuration report we were seeing some of the error in our ways and need to install some OS related libraries for this to compile right.
sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libwebp-dev
Right, NOW we're getting somewhere! The build-essential is kind of a 'DUH!' thing but then again we just loaded Ubuntu on this thin client. Didn't have it. libssl-dev is a requirement since they brought it back from the dead in version 3.1.0 of Dillo. And although optional, you can add libwebp-dev onto your OS so that Dillo can understand websites that are serving WebP.
After about 5 minutes of compiling on this computer from 2014 it was done! ready to rock!
I went to my XFCE menus and launched Dillo and under a second it was UP! Better than the twelve seconds it took with FireFox.
First time launching Dillo results in a whopping 4.7 megs of ram being used, versus Firefox eating 183 megs of ram just to start up.
Then again, Mozilla is not doing itself ANY favors by loading up the splash page of the app with ad-revenue, junk science and politics we didn't even ask for.
Of course, in both browsers the more sites we visit the more ram it may consume based off of the resources it has to pull from the internet. Mozilla can easily go into the gigs of ram.
Test Drive time.
Okay! Going past the splash page and onto the Dillo site with our gigabit fiber connection, it retrieves their site almost instantly. Unfortunately, there's no F12 to acquire metrics as to HOW fast it's pulling. But it's working.
Note: If you go to the Dillo website with a regular browser. It justifies to the center of the screen. It's not entirely understanding all of the CSS action going on.
This will be a problem as we do a little website inception and tell Dillo to go to our site next!
Okay, we're getting some serious old-skool browser flashbacks from our previous article, as Dillo can't really understand the CSS that drives our menu structure. As we begin to surf around our site we notice some of the background CSS animations are not moving either. In fact, anything that animates didn't move.
Now by default Dillo doesn't load background images by default. Nor does it 'Force HTTPS' which in itself is actually a good thing if you're visiting some older websites with this program. If you turn off all CSS it pretty much converts my website into something one would expect from Mosaic 1.x
So, let's turn on background images and reload.
Wooooboy!
Good news - SVGs seem to obviously work in version 3.2.0 of Dillo! My QR code is obviously there!
The background you are seeing technically should not be visible. Because in both the case of the SVG and the background itself. Dillo does not understand transparencies at all. Also, Dillo is refusing to pull any fonts even the SVG font set that we specified in our CSS which made ancient smartphones like the Palm Pre display the typesets correctly.
We are happy to report that when we looked at some of our video articles the HTML5 did kick in letting you know that the video cannot be directly played in the browser. This is where you tell Dillo to link to something else like VNC to play the videos we have hosted on this site.
Where Dillo really eats shit on our website is the Artwork category, where we tried to write up some CSS coding to act as a replacement for the immensely heavy JavaScript light boxing we had before. Again, if Dillo supported CSS3 like Firefox version 10 did then this would be minimized.
If a Dillo user switched over to our blog style artwork category system. Sanity is restored.
Dillo isn't broken. We're broken.
WordPress sites by their very nature use a lot of modern coding. In fact, it took a considerable amount of work from our end to remove all of the JavaScript that used to exist on this site. Now, if we point Dillo over to one of our friends in the Cellar Door
Getimiskon's website has been coded using more traditionalistic HTML, which Dillo honors. Showing that so long as the website was coded properly, the browser behaves. Granted the animated hover-over feature does not work in Dillo. In which Dillo didn't seem to focus much on animation for anything and instead focused on HTML for the sake of HTML.
CURRENT uses for Dillo.
Well, as you can probably guess. Using Dillo as a daily driver would probably be a no-go right now in the age of CSS3 , Javascript and embedded everything. This doesn't mean it's completely useless.
- Since HTTPS forwarding is NOT enabled by default. Monitoring unencrypted websites such as ShoutCast or IceCast servers can be a thing.
- If you are working on embedded projects that can have websites like an ESP32. this kind of browser would be perfect.
- Viewing anything on Wiby as its a search engine focused on old websites and there-fore within the same Vintage of Dillo.
- It's interesting looking at neocities and other sites with this browser as a compare/contrast of how older PCs would look at the internet.
- It's a little nostalgic for us personally revisiting an application we haven't used since our RedHat days.
Final thoughts.
Dillo may seem underwhelming for the average user. But everything has to start somewhere. Espechally since the original developer of Dillo passed away and now a new group of developers are picking up those pieces in the hopes of making a better and more optimized browser. If Dillo was more fleshed out such as adding CSS3 support it could possibly be used by other projects such as Tor or I2P because you're not supposed to use JavaScript on alternative networks.. Therefore. If your browser has no JavaScript support that means you can't really be affected by JavaScript. Right?
From the development POV Dillo is going to be a hard project. To make a browser that is very small in the age where browsers have a metric fuck-ton of feature creep inside of them. Even in their latest edition of 3.2.0 with adding SVG and WebP support. As a developer before you even pull out your keyboard one would need to ask if WebP was nessecary? Is it equal in CPU cycles to load a GIF,JPG,PNG? What about transparancies? How would that effect the effeciencies of the browser? Or SVG... since SVG is vector how would computers without a math co-processor handle this?
Better question would be: What is efficiency in the year 2025? Should we do what some web-developers have done and hold everything back to HTML 1.x? Or is it better to proceed gracefully in the future with bigger/better graphics so long as it somehow doesn't effect the memory consumption of the browser? These kind of questions would have to be perpetually asked throughout the build of the project.
Dillo has also made me reconsider some of our own design decisions for this website that we'll have to look into more carefully. If you think this project is worthwhile. Throw them cash, or help them add some new features if your a bad-ass enough of a dev. We did our part in getting the word out there. Now go out there and Dillo the web as disturbing as that may sound.
That's what server said.
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