Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser. Contribute to dillo-browser/dillo development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Maintainer here.
We are currently in the process of moving Dillo away from GitHub:
- New website (nginx): https://dillo-browser.org/
- Repositories (C, cgit): https://git.dillo-browser.org/
- Bug tracker (C, buggy): https://bug.dillo-browser.org/
They should survive HN hug.
The CI runs on git hooks and outputs the logs to the web (private for now).
All services are very simple and work without JS, so Dillo can be developed fully within Dillo itself.
During this testing period I will continue to sync the GitHub git repository, but in the future I will probably mark it as archived.
See also:
The website doesn’t display correctly when I increase the browser’s font size, and it doesn’t work in reader mode. :(
I have poor eyesight, so I can’t read the content.
Huh? For me it works fine? Are you sure you are on https://dillo-browser.org/ ?
By dpkirchner 2025-11-0611:081 reply I have the same problem, and yeah, that's the site. Tapping the button to increase the font size just zooms the page in so now I have to scroll horizontally to read the content. Something on the page is preventing natural reflowing, I could probably figure out what if I was on my desktop. My hunch is it's the row of images.
By 1718627440 2025-11-0612:42 It is because of this:
So the whole page width just increases with the font size. I think they should have used max-width instead..main { margin: 2em auto; width: 50em; }This also causes problems, when you resize your browser window.
Haven't got the chance to play around with it, but looks fun. And maybe something cool to use to repackage into an alternative Tor/I2P browser for hidden websites.
What's holding back CSS and HTML support (at their specific versions) and is there interest of expanding that support in full, but lacking resources?
By lhmiles 2025-11-067:33 Oh tor client is good idea
Many reasons, in no particular order:
- It is extremely slow and resource intensive. Opening any link/page takes at least 3 seconds on my fastest computer, but the content is mostly text with images.
- It cannot be used without JS (it used to be at least readable, now only the issue description loads). I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself. There are several CLI options but those are no better than just storing the issues as files and using my editor.
- It forces users to create an account to interact and it doesn't interoperate with other forges. It is a walled garden owned by a for-profit corporation.
- You need an Internet connection to use it and a good one. Loading the main page of the dillo repo requires 3 MiB of traffic (compressed) This is more than twice the size of a release of Dillo (we use a floppy disk as limit). Loading our index of all opened issues downloads 7.6 KiB (compressed).
- Replying by email mangles the content (there is no Markdown?).
- I cannot add (built-in) dependencies across issues.
I'll probably write some post with more details when we finally consider the migration complete.
By hoistbypetard 2025-11-062:20 > I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself.
I’m glad you’re prioritizing this and that you consider this a reason to choose a different forge.
It's an excellent choice. Though Microsoft alone should be a sufficient answer. Many people will never interact with github projects because it requires an account with the most unethical company that ever existed.
There's companies out there whose main source of business is wetworks, as in drone strikes and so on, microsoft going for the most unethical title, I don't think its even in the ranking.
I do agree that not using it is better morally, however, given the limitations of git vs fossil, which carries the issues and wiki inside the repo itself, its not a good idea to switch to another service without guarantees that its host will be forever standing, github won't die in the next decade, but the alternatives mentioned might. even google (code) got out of the source hosting business.
But your confidence in GitHub's continued existence comes from its network effects, no? And competing services can only gain such network effects if more people use them. So to me this feels like a defeatist argument.
This is not a magical achievement, github is solvent and its business model is solid, give the same amount of users to any other service and it might collapse. Any service has to scale and the more users it has the more costs it incurs, nonprofits are a risk, the moment they run out of money, the service collapses.
If it's not a magical achievement, then surely competitors could replicate it too.
Of course you can't put a million users today in a service used by a thousand yesterday, but I don't buy the "non-profits don't scale" argument. If that were true, we wouldn't have Wikipedia either.
Replication is not enough, Competition only wins if it offers lower cost or better service (or intolerable service if free), While yes, the userbase is essential, you're still ignoring the reason why the userbase is there in the first place services before github existed and github is the one that ended up winning, competition cannot just offer a better ethical stance and its not even that, since github itself is not doing anything criminal, it's simply aligned with microsoft, so the ethical stance is "I don't like AI" and "I don't like microsoft", that is simply not enough of an offer to make the entire userbase switch. the only way you could is if github decided to throw all of its userbase like bitbucket did, and given that its name is git, I doubt they'll ever do that.
By shiomiru 2025-11-0911:27 To clarify, I think it's fair to say "I use GitHub because I don't think MS is that bad" (I disagree, but it's at least a consistent view.)
I only take an issue with "I think MS is morally reprehensible but everybody uses it so I'll keep using it too" because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people looking for code hosting will use whatever they first run into, so when you choose a host for your project you are also directly channeling users towards said host. It's your responsibility to pick a host for your projects that isn't evil by your standards, whatever those may be.
By 369548684892826 2025-11-068:051 reply > the most unethical company that ever existed
Maybe in the tech world, but in the real world there are companies such as Nestlé out there competing for this title.
Not even in the tech world. Microsoft did more than its fair share of cutthroat business practices, but there are tech companies out there that are quite literally thriving on worker exploitation.
By 1718627440 2025-11-0610:141 reply Amazon?
By DrewADesign 2025-11-0610:39 Damn near any gig economy company.
By t43562 2025-11-0615:35 In the tech age there are new East India Company equivalents.
By kristopolous 2025-11-0612:20 Belgian Congolese tire companies under King Leopold, Atlantic slave trade companies, Basil Zaharoff and Vickers who sold machine guns to both sides agitating WW1, IG Farben who did the Nazi gas chambers, Shell oil who since the 1970s continues spending billions funding climate change disinformation and billions preparing for it, at the same time... It's a long list.
Take Hyundai, a brand I drive, childhood slave factories, in the 2020s... You can't even brush your teeth without the ghosts of slavery.
By oblio 2025-11-0612:12 Which one?
By paradox460 2025-11-073:15 > the most unethical company that ever existed.
The East India trading company?
By rationably 2025-11-069:36 Have you considered Sourcehut? sr.ht
By dbtc 2025-11-0523:29 I appreciate these priorities!
By fouc 2025-11-0610:36 Reasons 1, 2, and 4 convince me the most. It's insane how slow and cumbersome github's code review page has been is ever since they moved from rails to react.
By arcanemachiner 2025-11-069:273 reply They will happily steal it from the new site as well. :)
By mk89 2025-11-069:34 It's even faster to scrape, apparently :)
By thesuitonym 2025-11-0719:23 I understand that it's only token resistance, but if it were me, I'd rather not give them approval to do it.
By DrewADesign 2025-11-0610:43 Right. It’s fair use to munge your work into competing products against your will if it’s for the _~•’AI’•~_
I have the fondest memories of running dillo under netbsd on my hp jornada 728, around 2008 -2009… thank you for all the work!
By MarsIronPI 2025-11-0521:49 I remember installing Debian on my OLPC XO-1. Dillo and Netsurf were the only browsers that I even tried running on that thing (w. 512MB RAM). Netsurf had better compatibility, but Dillo was noticeably faster and more responsive. Truly a pleasure to use when it supported the site I was on.
And dillo still works great on NetBSD :)
I think it is becoming more important to i386 BSD, especially since i386 OpenBSD can no longer build Firefox, Seamonkey and IIRC Chrome on i386 systems.
I have been using dillo more and more as time goes on, plus you can get plugins for Gemini Protocol and Gopher.
By anthk 2025-11-0522:19 gemini://gemi.dev with News Waffle it's a godsend to read bloated news sites, both in English and in Spanish. Also, gopher://magical.fish The register, some bloated Spanish such as Xataka and Genbeta...
By threemux 2025-11-062:53 Hi there - love Dillo. I use it on NetBSD and it works great. Once you're off GitHub will there be a way to get notified of releases? I use GitHub's RSS feeds for that now.
Repeating a warning from github about the old URL - dillo.org is not controlled by the devs and could become a malware route, is that right?
Yes, thanks for the reminder. This is what they write about:
https://dillo.org/post-sitemap.xml
At some point I should investigate if we can fill a complaint to get it taken down at least. Here is more info: https://dillo-browser.org/dillo.org.html
By huflungdung 2025-11-0523:00 [dead]
It still has great looking icons, a proper boarder bevel, and real scroll bars. Thank you!
By jagged-chisel 2025-11-0523:074 reply I’m imagining a comfy bevel on the bench outside your hostile where your boarders can sit happily.
By eikenberry 2025-11-0520:162 reply What is the bug tracking software you are using?
I wrote my own:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/buggy/
It fetches the issues from GitHub and stores them in <number>/index.md in Markdown format, with some special headers. I then keep the issues in a git repository:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/
So we have a very robust storage that we can move around and also allows me to work offline. When I want to push changes, I just push them via git, then buggy(1) runs in the server via a web hook. This also tracks the edit changes.
While typing, I often use `find . -name '*.md' | entr make` which regenerates the issues that have changed into HTML as well as the index, then sends a SIGUSR1 to dillo, which reloads the issue page.
The nice thing of allowing arbitrary HTML inline is that I can write the reproducers in the issue itself:
https://git.dillo-browser.org/bugtracker/tree/501/index.md#n...
Closing an issue is just changing the header "State: open" by "State: closed", often with a comment pointing to the merged commit.
By 1718627440 2025-11-0610:18 > SIGUSR1 to dillo
That's an excellent program !
By khimaros 2025-11-0521:16 maybe of interest: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
By keyle 2025-11-0523:09 That is very cool.
By saint_yossarian 2025-11-0520:21
By fishgoesblub 2025-11-0520:073 reply Why cgit and not something nice like Gitea, or Forgejo?
They're like 10x more complex and you don't need most of their functionality for just a frontend.
That said I wish there was something a little better than cgit
By catwell 2025-11-069:14 If you're looking for something light, self-hostable and a bit more "social" (i.e. with pull requests and bug creation from the web) I recommend looking at https://tangled.org It doesn't render perfectly in Dillo but basic features appear to work.
However I really like what you've done here for Dillo as well.
Have you looked at self hosting sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/)?
Yes, but all those services have the same main problem: a single point of failure. They also don't work offline.
I believe that storing the issues in plain text in git repositories synced across several git servers is more robust and future-proof, but time will tell.
Having a simple storage format allows me to later on export it to any other service if I change my mind.
By mason_mpls 2025-11-063:51 What a breath of fresh air, I’m watching people dance with plain text behind the bars of Jira, GitLab & Teams
By thesuitonym 2025-11-0520:32 My guess is gitea and forgejo don't render well in Dillo.
By winningChild 2025-11-0520:28 [dead]
By al_be_back 2025-11-062:222 reply happy anniversary!
> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]
Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.
Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.
By mason_mpls 2025-11-063:48 More memory means more memory for my website to take up!
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-11-063:07 "High performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat."
If remove ads and behavioural tracking, speed is faster
But goal of Big Tech, who make the popular browsers, is to make speed faster (fast enough) _with_ ads and tracking
User wants fast speed. User does not want ads and tracking. Big Tech wants users in order to target with ads and tracking. Big Tech tries top deliver fast speed to keep users interested
User can achieve fast speed _without_ ads and tracking
I do it every day. I do not use a large propular browser to make HTTP requests nor to read HTML
By TheRealPomax 2025-11-0616:38 If you're putting everything on the same domain, I do hope you made it impossible for someone to ever get their hands on dillo-browser.org ever again.
Is there some kind of status tracker somewhere. That describes which web standards are supported?
Not really. There was this list but it is outdated: https://dillo-browser.org/old/css_compat/index.html
Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
I did some experiments to pass some tests from WPT, but many of them require JS to perform the check (I was also reading how you do it in blitz). It would probably be the best way forward, so it indicates what is actually supported.
By nicoburns 2025-11-0520:39 > but many of them require JS to perform the check
Yeah, if we add JS support to Blitz then one of our initial targets will probably be "enough to run the WPT test runner".
> I was also reading how you do it in blitz
We are able to run ~20k tests (~30k subtests) from the `css` directory without JS which is IMO more than enough for it to be worthwhile.
> Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.
Yes, and no. It definitely is an indicator to some extent. But in implementing floats recently I've a lot of the web suddenly renders correctly, but I'm only passing ~100 more tests!
By kragen 2025-11-063:10 That's wonderful to see!
By mixmastamyk 2025-11-0520:081 reply Hmm, it is tiny on my highres screen. Anyone know how to double the scale?
Check out: /etc/dillo/dillorc
There are options here for (my setup below):
geometry=1600x900
increase font_factor=1.75
bg_color=0xFAF9F6
Start and Home pages too.
By O1111OOO 2025-11-0915:59 update - this should be the core directory for changes, config, etc:
~/.dillo/ (per user directory)
dillorc is in here too and overrides /etc/dillo (the system-wide directory)
By 1718627440 2025-11-0612:47 How can you report something to the bug tracker?
If they could move away from c++ too.... like plain and simple C like the netsurf browser?
DIllo is much lighter and it supports Gopher, Gemini, Info, Man and potentially in a further future, URL rewritting plugins.
Yeah, but C++ compilers are pretty heavyweight. That said, rewriting a C++ codebase in C is about as likely as rewriting it in Java, so it wasn't a good suggestions.
The worst choice. Rust doesn't compile under OpenBSD i386. Dillo runs even on PPC and some m68k platforms. If any, maye FLTK + C.
On C++ compilers, clang++ it's much faster than g++ under legacy platforms. Clang uses far less RAM and CPU than GCC while compiling.
I know we have no cproc/cparser or tcc for C++, but at least clang it's usable with 1GB of RAM.
I just compiled some C++ code using G++ under ulimit -v 108032, but it didn't use much of the STL. For a simple example program using iostream, vector, unique_ptr, and std::string, I needed more, but had success with ulimit -v 262144: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/docentes.cc.
The last "real" C++ code I wrote was probably the modular softsynth in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams-c++.cc (see http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html for an explanation) which also compiles successfully in under 256MiB of virtual memory (¼GiB). But that's still under 500 lines of code.
I'm not sure how much RAM you need to compile G++ itself. More, I imagine. I was definitely compiling versions of GCC long before I ever saw a machine with so much RAM as 1GB, but I am guessing you probably need at least 1GiB for recent versions, maybe 4GiB.
LLVM, which is required for both clang and Rust, is much heavier. You definitely can't compile current versions of LLVM on i386, m68k, or any 32-bit platform anymore. You can get it to cross-compile to them as targets. In theory there are PPC64 machines that have enough address space to build it, but I'm not sure anyone ever made a PPC64 machine with enough physical RAM to build it in a practical span of time.
I run OpenBSD 7.8 under an i386 ATOM netbook, n270 CPU and 1GB of RAM. I hav no Rust, but I have C++, JimTCL, nim (I compled Chawan). Go runs, too. Maybe I can't compile LLVM in my netbook, but a tuned up machine with 2-4GB of RAM might be able to do such task with a bit of swap in a SSD and boosted up login.conf limits.
Maybe so, but I think it would have to be an amd64 CPU rather than an i386. Maybe you could do it inside of QEMU; does QEMU running on i386 permit emulating address spaces larger than 4GiB?
By anthk 2025-11-0617:45 If you run PAE and enable ZRAM, You can probably handle it by booting a 32 bit OS under a 64 bit machine as you state.
cproc/tcc/scc/etc are C compilers not c++.
If you want to compile a recent c++ compiler (gcc/clang), you must have already a c++ compiler (one of the biggest mistake in open source software ever was to move gcc to c++, clang doing the wrong thing right from the start...).
You can start to compile gcc 4.7.4, the last gcc compiler with buggy c++98 you could compile with a C compiler (you will need to patch it, and even unroll its full SDK), then you will have to compile at least 2 gccs to reach the last gcc. This insane mess is due to the infinite versions of c++ ISO "standard", introducing tons of feature creep which will force you to "upgrade" (mostly no real good reasons, namely developer tantrums, or planned obsolescence).
This is disgusting, Big Tech grade abomination of software engineering, shame on the people who did that and those in power who are not trying to fix it (probably the GCC steering committee).
I pointed out that some people seems to get good results at porting c++ to C using "AI"(LLM).
And big mistakes require big fixing.
By kragen 2025-11-0611:11 Yeah, we doin', big pimpin', we spendin' cheese
Big pimpin' on B-L-A-D’s, we doin'
Big pimpin' up in NYC
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C and B-U-N B
Rust it's worse for that; for full reproducibility you almost need to create a release-centipede from an old GCC-rs (or GCC) compilable release to the current one. At least that's the norm under Guix.
On cproc, cparser, I meant that we have no lightweight c++ compilers and sadly the closest to cparser in lightness it's clang++, because it's either that or the g++ behemoth.
In the light of all that, there are still people unable to understand why computer languages with ultra-complex syntaxes are really an issue (c++, microsoft rust, etc...)
By anthk 2025-11-0810:42 More like complex, overloaded. ML languages have a complex syntax but are manageable. OTOH, on Lisp, about bloated languages like Common Lisp compared to Scheme, you don't have to follow all the Common Lisp Hyperspec in order to create something; a subset would be pretty fine, even without CLOS. Scheme IMHO it's worse with SRFI's with tons of opaque numbers in order to guess what does that. And don't let me start on Guile modules vs the Chicken ones...
People rants about CL being a bit 'huge', but with the introduction to the Symbolic Computation book and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming you are almost done except for a few modules from QuickLisp (CL's CPAN/PIP), such as bordeaux-threads, usockets and MCClim for an UI, which will run everywhere.
C++ templates can be far more complex than Common Lisp macros. At least with CL you have a REPL to trivially debug and inspect then. Clang and GCC just recently began to introduce * understandable* help and error messages over template parsing walls...
By kragen 2025-11-0610:31 Rust compilers are an even bigger dependency than C++ compilers.
Microsoft rust is not that much worse than c++.
That said, it seems some people get nice results at porting from c++ to C using "AI" (LLM?).
By anthk 2025-11-0611:23 If fltk had C bindings it would have been a thing long ago, because usually C programs will run faster than their C++ counterparts. DIllo's requeriments would be far smaller (and Dillo runs on potatos, I won't be surprised if it still runs on i486 machines)
By kragen 2025-11-1215:32 *a good suggestion.
If anyone is interested in a modern take on a lightweight, embeddable web browser / browser engine (that supports features like Flexbox, CSS Grid, CSS variables, media queries, etc), then I'm building one over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
Feature support matrix is here: https://blitz.is/status/css
This month I have been working on support for CSS floats (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...) (not yet merged to main), which turn out to still be important for rendering much of the modern web including wikipedia, github, and (old) reddit.
EDIT: I should mention, in case anyone is interested in helping to build a browser engine, additional collaborators / contributors would very welcome!
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-0519:501 reply Mentioning your usage of servo components might help with credibility. You're not starting from scratch.
Edit: to be clear, I consider this a good thing. You've got a head start, are contributing to the ecosystem and aren't doing by yourself something that others have spent billions on.
By nicoburns 2025-11-0521:12 Yes, we've deliberately tried to make use of existing libraries (either from other browser engines or general purpose libraries) where possible.
The main thing we pull in from Servo (which is also shared with Firefox) is the Stylo CSS engine, which is a really fantastic piece of software (although underdocumented - a situtation I am trying to improve). I was recently able to add support for CSS transitions and animations to Blitz in ~2 days because Stylo supports most of the functionality out of the box.
(the other smaller thing we use from servo is html5ever: the html5/xhtml parser)
We also rely on large parts of the general Rust crate ecosystem: wgpu/vello for rendering (although we now have an abstraction and have added additional Skia and CPU backends), winit for windowing/input, reqwest/hyper/tokio for HTTP, icu4x for unicode, fontations/harfrust for low-level font operations, etc.
And while we're building the layout engine ourselves, we're building it as two independently usable libraries: Taffy for box-level layout (development mostly driven by Blitz but used by Zed and Bevy amongst others), and Parley for text/inline-level layout (a joint effort with the Linebender open source collective).
---
I wish that the Servo project of 2025 was interested in making more of their components available as independent libraries though. Almost all of the independently usable libraries were split out when it was still a Mozilla project. And efforts I have made to try and get Servo developers to collaborate on shared layout/text/font modules have been in vain.
Took me a sec to understand you didn’t mean you’re adding support for numbers with a comma :)
By cyanmagenta 2025-11-0519:472 reply Took me a sec to understand you meant comma as “decimal point” :)
Could this run in Wasm? Even if it was just running it 'headless'? I'm looking something like this to manage layout / animations of text like the DOM to plug into WebGL.
By nicoburns 2025-11-062:44 Yes. It currently compiles to WASM but doesn't run. But that's just a matter of plumbing it in properly.
If you were running it "headless" (which is supported), then it would probably work today.
There would also be the option of using Taffy and/or Parley (the layout libraries) without the rest of Blitz.
What JavaScript engine are you using/planning to use? I did a quick search on GitHub and found no results.
By nicoburns 2025-11-0520:22 That's a bit of an open question at the moment. The obvious choice from a Rust ecosystem perspective (easiest to integrate) would be Boa (https://boajs.dev/). It has excellent standards conformance, but terrible performance. We'd need to test to what extent that would be an issue in practice.
Other engines on my radar: quickjs, hermes, primjs (and of course V8/JSC/SM, but they don't exactly fit with the "lightweight ethos").
There is also the possibility of bindings with more than one engine and/or using some kind of abstraction like NAPI or JSI.
Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal.
I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages.
It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.
How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.
By glenstein 2025-11-062:04 I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either.
But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look.
Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.
By cachius 2025-11-0611:05 https://marginalia-search.com/ is a nice tool to surface such websites. It also has a nice minimal Wikipedia frontend https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Dillo
By amelius 2025-11-0610:44 One thing I worry about: whether it's ultralight on security features also.
