Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 14

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 is slow to change and 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.)

A convenient browser extension that detects cookie consent pop-ups and automatically fills them out according to your choices in the extension settings. So you only need to say (for example) “preferences are ok, but analytics and ad tracking aren’t” once instead of for every new site you visit.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited a website with a consent banner that it didn’t recognize.

By default it lets the pop-ups show briefly, so you know the site is tracking and you know the add-on is telling it what it can and can’t track, but you can also set it to hide them from the start if you’d rather not be bothered.

I’ve mainly used it with Firefox and Vivaldi, and there’s also a version for Safari.

I’ve mostly used Arch Linux on my PineTab 2, and occasionally in virtual machines for tinkering. What I’ve found is that once it’s installed it’s generally fine! The biggest issue I have with it is remembering the options for pacman instead of apk or apt or dnf, and that’s only because I use a lot of different Linux distributions on a regular basis! But I don’t like the throwback to the old days of setting up a system by hand. Even Alpine has a better installation process.

Since it’s a rolling distribution, included software tends to get updated faster than Fedora or Debian. It has a smaller selection, but between Flatpak and AUR that’s less of an issue than it could have been. I haven’t seen updates break the system, so there’s clearly some process to keep things stable-ish upstream. The AUR pseudo-packages are sort of like RPM spec files. You do need enough technical know-how to install the dev tools and run the package builder from the command line.

The main Arch project is only built for x86_64, with no official ARM version, but I’ve been quite happy with with the Danctnix distribution for Pine64 devices. Not only is it quick to update its aarch64 branch from the upstream project, it’s also quick to include things like driver updates for Pine64 hardware (which has been kind of important since the device shipped before all the drivers were finished).

All that said, I wouldn’t recommend it for a novice, unless the novice wanted to use it as a learning experience. I would recommend the Arch wiki, which has helped me many times!

I still have a soft spot for Firefox.

There have been times when it’s been the best web browser on Windows or Linux, and it’s still good on both (and macOS). I’ve used it as my primary web browser off and on for years. It’s stable! It runs almost everywhere (even on ARM systems)! It’s built into most Linux distributions (yes, aarch64 too)! It’s got a great extension ecosystem, and unlike Chrome, Mozilla is continuing to support older extensions.

Plus you can do things like translate languages locally on your device instead of calling out to a service like Google Translate, and keep your login sessions separate to prevent (for example) Facebook from tracking your activity on other sites even if they use Facebook features.

Compatibility

Unfortunately we’re in another period of near-monopoly in web browser engines. A lot of developers only test with Chromium browsers, like they only tested with Internet Explorer way back when – so there are websites that don’t work right, or don’t work at all. This is not Firefox’s fault, but it is a problem.

Vivaldi handles most of them, so I don’t have to keep Chrome around…except on one device for one website that I have to visit on a monthly basis.

Recommended Extensions

• KeePassXC-Browser autofills from KeePass when you have a vault open.
• Floccus Bookmark Sync works across more browsers than just Firefox.
• Privacy Badger blocks cross-site trackers including embedded social media.
• Consent-O-Matic autofills cookie preferences.
• More add-on reviews…

Mobile

I used Firefox for Android as the main web browser on my phone for several years (up through 2024).

Pros:

• Works just fine! (most of the time)
• Can run Portable Web Apps (PWAs)
• Can run extensions!
• Share button targets include other Firefox devices you’re synced with
• Doesn’t phone home to Google

Cons:

• Noticeably slower than Chrome or Vivaldi
• May phone home to Mozilla
• PWAs are clunky, and don’t support as many features as they do when installed through a Chromium browser.

I used to run PWAs in Chrome or Vivaldi even when I was using Firefox as my primary browser, just for the speed boost.

Sync

Syncing bookmarks, settings and history across multiple Firefox-based browsers is easy to set up. I turned off the bookmarks part in favor of using Floccus to sync with Vivaldi and other browsers. But when I was using Firefox on my phone, it was super-easy to send the page I was looking at over to my desktop or tablet. Your other Firefox devices just show up when you hit the share button.

In theory you can run your own sync server, which I…might get around to trying out sometime? Maybe?

Related Products

• Thunderbird is a great email client again, after a major slump during the 2010s.
• Pocket has been useful for read-it-later and read-it-offline scenarios, and sometimes for discovering interesting articles. I’ve actually been using it since before Mozilla bought it, all the way back to when it was called Read It Later. I used to find articles while at work, save them to Pocket, then take my tablet with me to read them at lunch even if there was no wi-fi connection where I went.
• Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is a fantastic reference for web development, and I highly recommend using it instead of, say, W3Schools.
• Fakespot is an interesting idea (detect bogus reviews and misleading store listings), but didn’t impress me when I tried it out a while back.

I haven’t used Relay (disposable email addresses) or their VPN, or their data breach monitor service, so I can’t really speak to how well they work.

Web Advocacy

Mozilla has done great work over the years advocating for an open web that everyone can use freely. They’ve called out industry privacy practices, dug into misinformation, tech policy and ethics, social impacts of the internet, and more. The “IRL” podcast series that ran from 2017 through 2023 was fascinating.

And of course maintaining their own rendering engine (Gecko) is an important bulwark against one company having too much influence over web technology. Firefox’s success in the mid-2000s arguably helped convince Microsoft to start improving Internet Explorer again after years of stagnation. Since Opera and Microsoft switched to Chromium in the 2010s, Gecko is the only major engine that isn’t controlled by Google (Chromium/Blink) or Apple (WebKit), making that role even more important.

The Mozilla Question

Unfortunately, Mozilla has a sustainability problem.

Mozilla’s main source of income is a deal to use Google Search as the default in Firefox. This is precarious, to say the least. It’s also been cited as monopolist behavior on the part of Google, and the US Department of Justice recommended blocking it…which ironically would cement Google’s dominance in browsers.

So the company has been flailing around for years, chasing trends in search of new revenue streams. Last year they shuttered the advocacy department and jumped into advertising…not exactly a popular move with people who were choosing it for privacy reasons.

As with Chrome, trust is easy to lose and hard to rebuild. Up to this point Mozilla’s flailing hasn’t made Firefox appreciably worse yet, but it’s likely slowed down making it better. I’d rather have feed detection back than an AI chatbot built into my browser.

I want Mozilla to succeed again. I want Firefox to keep getting better. But I’m concerned about the direction it’s going.

Update March 2025: Really, Mozilla?

Forks

There are a few forks of Firefox out there, and the occasional other Gecko-based browser. So far I’ve found I like LibreWolf, which is built for more privacy (at the expense of some capabilities), and Waterfox, which is built for a little more privacy and performance without sacrificing usability. These are smaller projects that build on top of Mozilla’s work and can insulate you a bit from Mozilla’s own…questionable decisions.

There was a time when Chrome was the fastest web browser available, especially cross-platform, and I used it as my main browser on Linux, Windows and macOS for most of the 2010s. But it gradually got more complicated, cluttered and slower. And since 2020 or so, it’s felt less like a user agent and more like a Google agent.

I switched back to Firefox a few years ago when Mozilla made some massive strides in performance, but kept Chrome as my alternate browser for websites that just won’t work right (or refuse to run) in Firefox.

The final straws:

• Planning to replace third-party cookie tracking by having the browser track you itself, which is both a breach of trust and will give Google’s own ad network an advantage.
• Google, an advertising company, making changes to its extension scheme that conveniently make it a lot more difficult to run ad blockers and privacy extensions.*

It’s clear that the people trying to make a good web browser are no longer the ones calling the shots: the advertising execs are. (You’ve probably noticed this happening with search too.)

Trust is easy to lose, and hard to rebuild. I uninstalled Chrome from everything except test environments and replaced it with Vivaldi, which has worked out great.

Yes, even my Android devices. Unfortunately there’s one website that I have to use that won’t work right in Vivaldi or Firefox, and I have to keep Chrome available on one device for that. Otherwise I’d flat-out disable it.