16 January, 2025
The Dillo browser is an extremely simple and efficient way to browse the web, clocking in at 45MB of RAM while displaying a relatively lengthy website. How does it accomplish this, you ask? Well, it doesn't support Javascript. It doesn't support streaming video, even though that's part of HTML5. Heck, it has some serious formatting issues with the "<IMG>" tag sometimes. A majority of websites have serious formatting issues even with text in Dillo, because although it does support CSS stylesheets, a lot of text these days is also manipulated by Javascript and unsupported tags.
So, this all sounds pretty negative so far, huh? It seems like this is just a post complaining about Dillo and its many limitations. But that's not how I feel about it at all! I love Dillo, and I enjoy the limitations that it puts on web usage. Seeking out websites that render well on Dillo is really a sport in itself. I find that the more technical the content of the website (Distrowatch.org or Cat-v.org are good examples), the better the HTML tends to be written, and then it works great on Dillo. The more mainstream a website is with a larger audience, the more reliant they become on modern web technologies and the HTML itself starts getting sloppy enough to no longer render well in Dillo, even though it all evens itself out in Chromium and Firefox. So basically what I'm saying here is that Dillo is a hipster browser which enforces adherence to hipster websites.
Keeping the hipster mindset front and center, Dillo has plugins that make it work with Gemini, Spartan, and even MAN pages. Implementing a functional web rendering engine sounds like a lot of work, but getting Gemini working in Dillo was clearly highly important. No, seriously though, I love Gemini, and I can fully understand wanting to get it up and running in a browser that's meant to be simple and straightforward, it's a natural fit. For those of you that haven't heard of the Gemini or Spartan protocols yet, they're text-based alternatives to the web, very roughly based on Gopher, the precusor to the WWW. It's a way for people to feel special by cordoning themselves off from the average person, and as I said, I'm guilty of enjoying the experience myself. Really, it's just a great community of people that you can only access by connecting to their special snowflake protocol.
But I digress! Too busy talking about special protocols when I'm meant to be discussing a special browser! One nice thing about Dillo that it's "famous" for, if such an obscure browser can be said to be famous for anything, is that it will run on very, very old hardware. Do you have an old Pentium II clunker from the late 90's rotting in your attic? Does it have more than 45MB of RAM? Well, then it can probably run Dillo, and fairly capably as well. With that said, just think about how great it'll run on your more modern PC, even if it's a few years (or decades) old. It's not a bloated, RAM-destroying piece of software like Chrome. It's lean, mean, and quick! And also less capable. Did I mention that already?
As with so many things in this world, nothing is black and white. Dillo is speedy and light on resource use, BECAUSE it doesn't do a whole lot. But the limitations are the fun in my opinion, and I really love finding websites that display well on it. I can tell you that this very website you're reading this post on works great on Dillo! I made sure of it.