Dillo (Web Browser)

★★★★☆

Before we start: Dillo (as in armadillo) is built for the web of documents, not applications. It intentionally doesn’t support JavaScript, and while it can work with server-side web apps, you have to jump through a few hoops to enable cookies on a given site.

That said…

Speed

Dillo is an incredibly fast ultra-minimalist web browser for Linux and other Unix-like systems. This makes it a good first choice on old or low-end hardware, or in a constrained virtual machine. You can keep another browser around as fallback for online apps that need JavaScript, complex styles, or newer features.

The lack of scripting also means that most advertisements and tracking won’t load in the first place, making it even faster (and good for privacy!)

Visuals

CSS support lags behind quite a bit compared to other web browsers, but that’s partly because development stalled for a decade when one of the project leads passed away.

Depending on how complex a site is, it might display just fine, or a little bit off, or be way off but still readable. Or broken. On sites powered by MediaWiki (Wikipedia, Fandom wikis, etc), for instance, the articles themselves are often readable, but the sidebars, headers or footers may look like they’ve been broken up into pieces.

And I keep having trouble getting it to display emoji consistently under Linux, though it displays them fine on macOS.

So whether Dillo works for you depends heavily on what you want to use it for. If you want to connect to Bluesky or read Gmail or anything like that…that’s not going to work. At all. Online shopping would be iffy at best. But if you’re searching for information, or hanging out at Metafilter, or actually reading stuff, it might be worth a look.

Fediversal

Unfortunately Dillo can’t show you the project’s own Mastodon account, because Mastodon requires JavaScript.

But a Snac timeline looks good – which makes sense, because Snac is ultra-minimalist itself – and you can even log into a Snac site and post, because Snac only requires baseline HTML and HTTP(s) to work! The UI is a bit clunky because the browser doesn’t support the HTML5 Details element (yet?), so all the forms and buttons and fields are visible all the time. But it works!

Small Internet and Other Plugins

There are plugins available to support various “small internet” protocols like Gemini and Gopher. And since even the oldest web browsers already support more formatting than Gemtext, plain text, or Gopher menus, they don’t suffer at all. I mean, yeah, Lagrange is prettier, but that’s all in the defaults, not the site support!

There are also plugins to enable IPFS, bookmark sync via Firefox accounts, and a dedicated reading mode.

Availability

Current packages (3.1 and up) are available in various Linux distributions including Fedora, Arch and Alpine, and in Homebrew for macOS.

Debian still has the old 3.0 release from before the multi-year gap, which is unfortunate because it doesn’t handle newer SSL/TLS, and there’s no Flatpak or Snap as far as I know, but you can still install it from source on Debian or an atomic distribution like Fedora Silverblue.

Apparently it works on Windows with Cygwin again, too! (I wrote up how to compile the old GTK+ version on Cygwin, back when I was maintaining RPM packages for installing Dillo on Fedora and a couple of other distributions, but that’s been obsolete since the switch to FLTK in 2008, and I eventually deleted it in one site cleanup or another.)