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Dillo is a safe browser. Then again, Dillo has no CSS (not needed, IMHO), no Javascript (needed for most webmail accounts), spotty SSL support, and broken table layout (which makes designing a web page for every browser including Dillo nay-to-impossible; I just forget about making my web pages usable in Dillo; it's up to Dillo to lay out tables correctly) And, oh, it's the only browser that runs on my 486 SX/25.

Hmmm...the lowest end machine I have right now is one of those ancient Gateway Handbooks. It's a tiny little subnotebook, circa 1993, with a 486 SX25 processor and 20 megs of Ram. Firefox is a pipe dream on this machine (FF runs slowly even over the network via X). Dillo is barely usable; it takes about three seconds to redraw the screen (such as when scrolling up or down). I can't get older versions of Netscape or even the Ted word processor to run on this machine. The last major release of FreeCIV does run, albeit slowly, if I use the XAW client.

I might be able to get a Small spreadsheet to run on this antique.

I can't believe that you are running Firefox on a system with only 32 megs of RAM. The Firefox I'm running right now is using over 100 megs of ram, judging by its VSZ size. I know there is an embedded port of Firefox for PDAs, not to mention an embedded version of Konqueror.

Last time I had 24 megs of ram, I used Netscape Navigator 4.x until I could get a system with more memory; it was just not possible to run Mozilla on that machine.

What web browser are you running on that NeXT? I've got a 294 MHz R5900 with 32MB here, so I use dillo http://www.dillo.org/ quite a bit.

http://www.dillo.org/ = the lightest you can get

but no javascript/css/ssl

it is incredibly fast and tiny
runs even on a pda's

good for testing a website for accessibility

The reason why I prefer Firefox can be summed up in one word: CSS. In particular, I would like to make a web page that uses 100% CSS for layout, but, right now, I can't because of MSIE's broken css.

In more detail, I want a web page that is usable (doesn't require scrolling) at all screen resolutions and on all browsers, while still having a sidebar defined via CSS. The way to do this is with the max-width CSS attribute; this way, when the content becomes smaller than the screen size, the elements sized with max-width become smaller while the fixed sized elements stay the same size.

However, I can't do this because MSIE 6.x, which is about 90% of the web surfing public and about 30-40% of the people who go my web site, doesn't support it. I don't want to use the non-standard expression hack bacause that may break in MSIE 7. Ditto with all the hacks that hide CSS from MSIE while keeping the CSS visible to other browsers (the one hack I do use, the include(file.css) hack to make the CSS invisible to Netscape 4, causes the Wayback machine to not render the CSS when looking at older versions of my web page in Firefox)

The only way I can make variable-width elements which are (pretty much) guaranteed to not break with future browsers is to use a table, since the 1990s table rendering algorithm does make the table narrower when the browser screen becomes narrower than the table.

This, however, breaks in Dillo, which has broken table layout. Since Dillo is, like, 0.1% of the browsing public, I just have to make the page look a little worse in Dillo (it's still usable, but one has to scroll between the navigation bar and the content of the web page when viewing in Dillo at 640x480)

If MSIE had working CSS, I wouldn't have to do this; I would put all of the layout in CSS, which will make the web page look better in Dillo, Netscape 4, and look better if someone prints out the web page.

This is why I want more people to use Firefox (or Opera): So that I can more comfortably set up CSS without breaking legacy browsers.

One minor problem with this is that Dillo, a browser that maybe three people actually use (OK, maybe a couple more, since on certain old 486s and 386s, it's the only browser that will run) incorrectly renders tables (it doesn't do the whole "make sure the table fits in the browser width" and "when not, make sure all the table elements become ewually thinner" stuff that Netscape did and all browsers that want to be usable on the modern web do) that do this trick to implement max-width.

Since, maybe .1%, if even that, of people out there use Dillo to look at web pages, this is not a significant issue. The way I work around it is to make sure a single table cell isn't wider than 640 pixels. I've also posted a patch to the Dillo mailing list which somewhat resolves the issue.

Accessing the Internet is also possible with a 486; no, you're not going to run the latest browser with your Flash animations and Java applets and beautiful CSS stylesheets and the like, but they're adequate for viewing text-based sites,

Not just text-based sites, either. The Dillo browser runs great even on a 486, probably even with only 16M of RAM, and renders most sites quite well. It doesn't support plugins like flash or java of course, but still makes for a useful web browsing experience.

If you have access to a Unix box somewhere on the net, set up an http proxy server on it and make an ssh tunnel from your machine to it with forwarding of port 3128 or 8080 or whatever the proxy runs on. Then do all your web browsing through that ssh tunnel. This is usually faster over a modem link because you don't have the latency of doing DNS lookups and opening new TCP connections locally.

If the proxy server at the other end is something like RabbIT that can compress images and web pages, so much the better. If you run WWWOFFLE locally to do agressive caching of pages (and allow offline browsing), better still. For added blazing speed use dillo as your web browser (though I must admit I mostly use Firefox nowadays).

Finally note that you don't need loband.org for Slashdot - just enable 'light mode' in your preferences.

I've been playing with dillo recently, and although it's still in relatively early stages of development when compared to Gecko & KHTML what it does now is already impressive, but moreso the speed that it does what it does blows my mind - i'm on a T3 connection so transfer speed is not an issue, as such page rendering is near-instantaneous. I'll certainly be keeping my eye on it in the future, in a few years it could very well be competing with Firefox to dethrone IE once and for all.

If you really need a lightweight web browser for an older machine, I would recommend

Dillo - a nice lightweight browser, but no CSS or Javascript. Requiress GTK something.

Links 2 - Runs in X, frame buffer, SVGA. Some CSS and Javascript support.

Of course, here is their vulnerability report for IE 6 as a comparison. If you want airtight browser security, just use Dillo.

What use is linux for handhelds, considering there are currently no good open source mini browsers (eventually, there will be minimoz) or handwriting recognition programs.

philo

well, i don't know about tabs... but the fastest browsers on earth are:

lynx
links
dillo

if you don't mind not seeing the pretty pictures, that is.

It should be Dillo! Oh God, what a stupid typo... Please mod parent down.

Dillo is for you.
http://www.dillo.org/

It has all the features you need.
I need other features, and I use Firefox + extensions.

Dillo is faster than any web browser I've ever seen!

Perhaps you should look at Dillo.

It doesn't render like IE, but it meets all the other requirements :)

Sounds like Dillo is the right motherfuckin' browser for you!

I personally use Dillo when memory is tight (I've only got 512 MB of RAM). It's got tabs, is very speedy, generally renders fine and small footprint (~400KB). I use FireFox and Konqueror for my primary browsing, but Dillo is quite handy when I have applications compliling or I'm burning a CD.

I recall several months (possibly a couple years) back in Zaurus dev newsgroup a thread about porting Mozilla to the Qtopia/ARM platform and it was determined that it just simply couldn't be done and maintain efficient memory usage. The specs of PDAs have not changed drastically in the lsat 2 years, so I'm eager to find out if some sort of "breakthrough" was accomplished that allowed Mozilla to have a reasonable footprint on low-memory devices. Opera for Qtopia/ARM will be hard to beat. The only thing I miss is tabs, but it does have its own windowing system of sorts that assists in pop-up blocking and keeping track of opened links. It's also worth noting that Konqueror has been ported to Qtopia/ARM as well.

Either way, I'm excited about the prospect of being able to use Mozilla on my Pocket PC or Zaurus (PocketIE is atrocious)

konqueror embedded is only about 2mb! opera is abou 3mb. Both are extremly fast on Qtopia based handhelds. I dont think there is a need for mozilla. In fact, GPE and X based handhelds already have Dillio

I haven't seen this anywhere, but how much work would it take http://www.dillo.org/ to run on a mobile device?

Straight from their page:

# Dillo is small: source is less than 400 KB, and the binary is around 350 KB !
# Dillo aims to be a multi-platform browser alternative that's small, stable, developer-friendly, usable, fast, and extensible.

I don't do much coding, but wouldn't it be trivial to take such a small code base and use it for the phone or pda? They have it available for the iPaq here It looks like clean code to me. just a thought.

I haven't seen this anywhere, but how much work would it take http://www.dillo.org/ to run on a mobile device?

Straight from their page:

# Dillo is small: source is less than 400 KB, and the binary is around 350 KB !
# Dillo aims to be a multi-platform browser alternative that's small, stable, developer-friendly, usable, fast, and extensible.

I don't do much coding, but wouldn't it be trivial to take such a small code base and use it for the phone or pda? They have it available for the iPaq here It looks like clean code to me. just a thought.

Strange because I can't stand PDFs and would imagine the consensus would be the same. In fact there is a group (will search later) that advocates the non-use of PDFs for websites. Sure have a download PDF link - but not just stick a PDF file no matter what.

The comparison between RAMs will have to be benchmarked. I imagine a PDF-reader plugin being fired is way heavier on resources than parsing an HTML page. It takes at least 5 seconds for Acrobat Reader to open. Also there are browsers that are anything but ram-consuming. Dillo has a very low memory print. Incredibly fast - as it rejects the DOM tree, CSS and Javascript (no wonder).

PDFs are not accessible - HTML is at least in principle accessible (depending on the web-designer). So Braille / Text readers or browser for the visually impared can enjoy the article.

The text layout rendering again is subjective. I abhor PDF, it is static, inflexible, sure I can zoom in, but i can't just augment the fonts without having to deal with scrollbars eventually.

The sudden jump between pages is another very annoying feature -for me. Where am I now page 3 or 4 ?? huh?

Again I am surprised I thought the anti-PDF feeling was pretty widespread - but I guess not. So that I find particularly interesting (after all noone thinks the same).

For me PDF great - to download and print and read it at your own leisure in the toilet.
For me HTML great - to read online - but usually an ugly mess if you care to print it out.

Websites should always keep it short, sweet, simple.

weird and my experience is that Konqueror is faster than all other browsers except Dillo of course.

But WHY DA FUCK does Konqueror put that ANNOYING BORDER-LINE around tags (ie Flash) is beyond me !!

And no there is no round it when coding XHTML/CSS.

There is a browser lighter than Firefox but better than Links, you know.

http://www.dillo.org/

Did you try Dillo?

• Internet Exploder 5+
• Mozilla Gecko family
• Opera
• KTHML

Why do all of the M$ apologist say this?

IE works, it does some things well ... IE has links directly into the OS which make the vulnerabilities.

Dillo works about as well as IE and better in some ways. Those ways being that it won't root your system, unless you port it to M$ and open yourself to the same kinds of bugs that get other programs like M$ Word. Oh wait, does this mean that Word "links directly into the OS"? Nah, it means the OS is a piece of poop, just like the browser. IE does nothing that other browsers don't do and it does what it does poorly. Windoze also does less than other OS and does what it does poorly.

You would have to have your head screwed on backward to not see the differences.

IE5.5 is no longer a supported browser... you can't even download it anymore. You can bet it's full of unpatched holes.

486s are not for Windows, they're for running Linux.. which has more then it's share of lightweight browsers.

Check out dillo. Perhaps we should be thinking about adding HTTPS support to such a lean, mean browser, instead of bloating an already laggy piece of software?

IE - java - activeX = Dillo - efficiancy

Good thing they don't charge a lot of money for it! It's "free" with your $300 purchase of an OS that has no spell checker. Ha, ha, ha.

Since we're talking browsers, which ones are best to use?

I personally prefer Opera. However, some prefer the Gecko browsers, especially Fire(random). Myself, I hate it, but it's a matter of personal taste, and I've never liked Netscape's products, even in the 1.x days.

Also, I just downloaded linux to make the switch.

What distribution by chance?

Unfortunately I just found that I no longer have any burner software on my windows box so I can make the switch..

VMWare is your friend. They offer a trial version, too. And, if the "hardware" doesn't play nice with your distro, try Microsoft(!) Virtual PC, again available in a trial version. You'll need Windows 2000 or XP, and a boatload of RAM (it will work with 256, but then you can only safely give your distro 128MB to play with).

GRRRR I guess I won't see MS bundle burner software free, eh?

Well, you CAN burn files to a CD using Windows XP, but it can't handle a .ISO.

What are the preferred linux browsers? I've used konqueror before as well as firefox. But I see there is dillo.

Konqueror - Don't like KHTML one bit, and I think the UI is horrible on Konqueror.
Firefox - see my comment above
Dillo - That isn't in the same class as IE/Gecko (Moz, Firefox)/Opera/KHTML (Konq, Safari). It's a lightweight browser, but I think it's only HTML 3.0, and rendering isn't great at all. I personally think this is worse than the Firefox /. rendering issue.

I ran Debian on an equivilent laptop to that. It didn't run amazingly fast, and I used Links (in the console) and Dillo (when in X) for web browsing. Mozilla was absolutely hopeless, although Opera was almost usable.

For IM, there was naim, and when I felt fancy, Gaim ran pretty well too, but then I couldn't really do too many things due to X taking up resources.

Mozilla has both a "quirks" mode and a "web standards complient" mode; where the rendering changes depending on whether the page in question conforms to the standards.

Personally, I think people place too much emphasis on "web standards"; there is this myth going around that, if a web page is correct XHTML, one doesn't need to test their web page on different browsers. Sorry, nope. First of all, different browsers have different bugs one needs to work around. IE 5.x, for example, is well known for having a broken "CSS" box model. Dillo has a bug where it treats UTF-8 documents as iso-8859-1 pages, even with a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"$gt;. Second of all, MSIE 6.0 is about 90% of the browser market. It can not corrently handle Content-Type: application/xml documents.

some more info

• Netscape Communicator 4 for the web. This is what I used before upgrading my P100. If you use Linux, Dillo is a leightweight web browser (don't know how well it hacks the modern web).
• GAIM for all your IM needs. Supports AOL, Yahoo IM, etc. Available both for Windows and for Linux.
• If using Linux, don't use KDE nor GNOME. XFCE or FVWM are far more snappy and memory-efficient.

> It would also probably cut the number of web pages you can view by half as well.

I'm well aware. I actually really like the other poster's suggestion about Dillo, thanks to them!

>I still write in HTML 4.0 Transitional and validate it. Why should I be left out?

You're not left out. If I *really* need your site, I can scrounge up the 27MB of Firefox.

>XHTML is unnecessarily complex for my needs. At the end of the day, I merely want a site that looks reasonably good and is functional.

XHTML is, by definition, much simpler than HTML, since it comprises of a smaller set of tags and attributes. I'm assuming you mean CSS, but -honestly- you can make an ordinary site very easily using CSS (admittedly making an absolutely positioned site is much easier than a relatively positioned one).

This is technically offtopic, but often much of the 'slowness' we still experience on our computers which people often blame on their 'operating system' isn't really down to the operating system (i.e. kernel), but more the higher level stuff that runs on top of it. It seems that lots of efforts are going into making operating systems more efficient, since there's lots of interest in this area, but that efficiency is more than lost further up. (Not that I should be complaining, since I'm just another person not doing anything about it.)

Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.

Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.

I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.

On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo, a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.

Gosh, how can they possibly manage to render a *web page* on an embedded device with *only* 64 megabytes of memory? Good luck to the project developers, but I think they face an impossible task.

BTW, for a lightweight graphical web browser I like dillo, it's what I am using to post this comment. The main downside is that it doesn't do SSL very well.

Its been done, ever use links (built to betty lynx)? Links has an option to compile in graphial suppost, however I never have done this, I use dillo.

So now it only requires 64 MB of RAM to format text and pictures, eh? I ran my first web browser on a computer with 32 MB of RAM. And what about Dillo, which has only 400k of source code?

Dillo is a fast, small footprint, neat little web browser.

I still use Moz mail for my mail though, but that's mainly because I have megabytes of old mail in hundreds of folders and I want to keep accessing them.

If you want real fast browsing, give Dillo a try. It still has trouble rendering some pages, but it leaves all the so-called "fast" browsers far behind.

Using lynx, links or dillo will give you a similar browsing experience on your main PC.

Using mozilla with images blocked from images.slashdot.org will probably have the same effect aswell.

I can't find a site that it renders in any usable fashion.

livejournal? no

slashdot? no

consumptionjunction? no

not to rain on anyone's parade, but dillo is going to need a LOT of work before its even usable.

i would say ditch it and get to work on something more competitive.

A happy compromise between Lynx and Mozilla is a browser called Dillo. It lacks the features of Mozilla, but the binary is 300k and it's disgustingly fast.

browser: Links, w3m (tables and images), Mozilla 1.0, Dillo, or Opera

window manager: Window Maker, Flux Box, or Oroborus

Emacs/Vim and LaTeX, or GNU TeXmacs for word processing

I've used all of these tools except for Opera, and I find them to be perfectly reasonable.

But if you want the latest and greatest visually, then yes, you are going to have to upgrade.

We've got Links, Dillo, and we could probably get Gecko working within reasonable constraints. We have commercial products on our side such as Netfront, Opera. If you're talking QNX, you've also got Voyager. So yeah, Windows, 0, the other guys, 1.

As the other reply mentioned, this is off-topic.

But on the other hand, I run Linux on a p166mmx laptop /w 96mb ram.

I run Debian on it, with the Ion window manager and XFree86 3.3.6 (cos I don't like the glidepoint, and I use mostly console apps on it), but you could use IceWM, Blackbox or XFCE, all of which are in Debian Stable (Woody).

For a web browser I use Dillo mostly but Mozilla for some stuff (SSL etc). I don't use email on that machine though.

For productivity I have vim :P but AbiWord and Gnumeric would work okay I would imagine.

Basically, keep it sensible, and don't go for any memory intensive stuff (KDE / GNOME). Recompiling the kernel would help.

It's a nice laptop actually, apart from the HDD has a maximum transfer rate of 4mb/s, which is it's downpoint. Still, it's adequate for it's needs.

Martin