The Dillo web browser has returned with a new release, version 3.1. It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015. P

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

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2024-05-08 11:00:08

The Dillo web browser has returned with a new release, version 3.1. It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015.

Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial repository, incorporated about 25 outstanding fixes, and added as many again of his own.

Dillo is a super-lightweight graphical web browser for Unix-like OSes, written using the Fast Light Toolkit. The latest version has a number of new features, although one of the most significant is support for Transport Layer Security. TLS is the successor to SSL, with a Microsoft-approved name. Dillo 3.1 supports it thanks to the Mbed-TLS library.

Even so, Dillo remains very limited. It doesn't support frames, embedded media playback, and, biggest of all, JavaScript, so most of the modern web is inaccessible to it. However, it can run on very low-end hardware – users report success on 486 PCs with 32 MB RAM – so it's the browser of choice for several ultra-lightweight Linux distros, such as the also recently revived Damn Small Linux.