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  • Dillo works surprisingly well. I've used it on older systems running new operating systems. It does a web browser should do best: read web pages.
  • I'm impressed. It runs my dev blog quite well. Some of the CSS alignment is off and it doesn't load web fonts, but it looks basically the same as Chrome. Even the syntax highlighted code snippets work.

    https://joshondesign.com/2025/09/16/embedded_rust_03

  • Was a lifesaver to me back in the day, running my frankenstein machine pieced together from useless spares I cobbled together from the computer store I worked at briefly. Every piece of software I ran was trimmed down to the absolute minimum, and it was a time before the web was completely unusuable without an ad blocker. Fond memories of Dillo.
  • I used to use it, like over 20 years ago! Mozilla Suite was too slow for my taste and I only reached for it if Dillo couldn't render a page :)

    IIRC I stopped using it when Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time) was released.

  • I noticed the original commit to Git was October 2007 - but if you look at that commit it include this Changelog https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/blob/93715c46a99c96d6... which has the earliest entry of:

      dillo-0.0.0.tar.gz [Dec, 1999]
    
    Legendary project.
  • 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that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it.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.

  • 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!

  • 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:

    - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/114927456382947046

    - https://fosstodon.org/@dillo/115307022432139097

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