Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices) [LWN.net]

LinuxDevices covers the Dillo project. "A project to create an ultra-lightweight web browser for use in embedded devices and other resource-constrained hardware has issued a plea for financial help. The Dillo Project says it needs to find a corporate sponsor in order to add anti-aliased text, CSS, Javascript, and internationalization/localization support." (Thanks to Alan Carvalho de Assis)

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Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 3, 2006 22:38 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> anti-aliased text, CSS, Javascript, and internationalization/localization support.

Curiously now that https is implemented, I only need cookie support to be
able to use it (e.g. to read LWN), but this is not in the list.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 12:17 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

It already supports cookies, I use it to read LWN all the time.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 14:29 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Excellent! It seems cookies support was disabled in my config.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 3, 2006 22:56 UTC (Tue) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Seems like if they really want "ultra-lightweight" they should forget js and css. Sure they're needed for most "consumer" websites, but you can still pull much information content without them. If they really need it to be full featured, could they really make it a lot lighter than KHTML?

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 7:21 UTC (Wed) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link]

Surely FLTK will yield a good looking and pretty compact self-contained app, and it might so be that GTK2 is larger than GTK1.

However, by not moving to GTK2 they will be left out of new devices such as Nokia's tablet, the OLPC, smartphones using the Linux-based PalmOS, etc. These devices have shared GTK2 libraries for dynamic linking, and in them the memory footprint of a GTK2 Dillo would probably be lower than the static FLTK version.

Oh, and by the way, if the founder's name is Jorge Arellano Cid, it would never be "Cid" who said anything, but either "Arellano Cid" "Arellano" or "Jorge". It is a spanish name with a given name (Jorge) and two last names: Arellano (from his father) and Cid (from his mother). I know this nitpicking would belong to the original LinuxDevices article, but I hope some Evolution hacker reads it here. It is A PAIN IN THE A$$ to input spanish names in Evo (or Thunderbird, or Outlook ...). I have explained this in mailing lists and bug reports, but nobody listened.

dillo needs to be a better alternative

Posted Oct 4, 2006 16:44 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

i have used dillo in the past and consider it useful, but at this point i
am not going to install gtk1.2 libs on my box. since i have "garbage"
hardware (old celeron laptop from 2001, 256 mb ram), i am in fact in the
market for light tools, but i have migrated to elinks. while i am running a
text-only browser, i am still doing so in an xterm with freetype etc
enabled. dillo needs to at least catch up with these advances.

by the way, elinks has some very neat features that make it worth
exploring. first and foremost in my mind is the ability to code my own
"hooks" with lua. this in my mind is much stronger than the firefox
kinda-equivalent, greasemonkey. i would love it if firefox simply provided
the same lua extensions that elinks supports today.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 7:55 UTC (Wed) by mtk77 (guest, #6040) [Link]

Why do they need money? I read this as:

Developers of tiny Linux browser dislike day jobs.

Without malice to them, the fact that that they have added little new functionality since Dillo was Raph Levien's gzilla SEVEN YEARS AGO would be off-putting to me if I was a potential sponsor.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 11:37 UTC (Wed) by acassis (guest, #38550) [Link]

This don't use gzilla engine anymore, the actual engine was rewrote from scratch.
Anyway the project is evoluving slowly because it has just one developer and he has another job.

Tiny Linux browser project seeks sponsors (LinuxDevices)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 16:28 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

Years ago, last time I looked at it, it was claimed that 5 devs worked on it full-time, IIRC (it was about when they decided to port it to FLTK).

Anyway, nothing much changed at all since 2003, they were looking for money at that time too. But development was always slow, as external devs were either ignored or scared away. Features like https, internationalization, freetype fonts etc. were already implemented at that point, some multiple times by independent people. But outside contributions were never appreciated and nothing came of it. But don't trust my foggy memory, read their mailinglist for the sad truth. Hopefully they learned from their faults and it's much better now.

Forgot how fast it is :)

Posted Oct 14, 2006 7:10 UTC (Sat) by a_hippie (guest, #34) [Link]

Using kubuntu's latest, I ran "apt-get install dillo" and bang, I'm smurfin' lwn at light speed!

I had forgotten how fast this browser really is.

konq/firefox move over!

heehee

Wishing you well.