Dillo: a fast, lightweight, graphical Web browser

Jeremy Henty

Cambridge Linux Users Group

CB2 Thursday, 5 March, 2009

Online version

Dillo

A GUI web browser

• Fast
• even usable under valgrind
• No heavyweight dependencies
• Used by many lightweight distros
• Big player in this niche

Aims of the project

Democratise access to data by

• Lowering hardware requirements
• Lowering bandwidth requirements
• very important in rural areas
• Encouraging standards
• Built-in HTML bug-meter
• Encouraging privacy

Past: Dillo-1

• Started circa 2000
• Written in C
• Used Gtk1 for the GUI
• Final version: 0.8.6
• Stalled, then abandoned in 2007
• developers failed to find funding
• Gtk1 was a dead end

Present: Dillo-2.0

must… not… insert crappy "Matrix Rebooted" reference…

• Beta available in early 2008, released in October 2008
• Written in C, C++
• Uses FLTK2
• statically linked if you want
• Gtk2 was rejected, too heavyweight
• many improvements
• tabbed browsing
• antialiasing
• different character sets
• accepts compressed pages
• control over image loading
• smaller footprint
• fewer dependencies
• better table rendering
• bugfixes
• improved GUI

Coming soon: Dillo-2.1

Real soon now!

• CSS support
• fonts
• text sizes
• colours
• Close tab button

Development

• The FLTK2 port was written privately…
• …then development was made public
• Excellent developer documentation
• using doxygen
• New developers are joining the project!
• Revision control
• originally CVS
• now Mercurial
• hosted on the same server as the Dillo Debian package
• Thanks, Debian!