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The real shame of it is that the Dillo project is on hold now, even though with the tiniest fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project, it could very quickly become an absolutely amazing web browser. It's really the same thing that happened with Links-GUI... Two amazingly promising browsers, going nowhere.

They finally managed to get the code released for the half-finished port to FLTK last month, and there's been a massive flurry of activity on the developers mailing list and in CVS. I guess no one's updated the project web page yet.

Dillo is philosophically a perfect match for this project. One of its goals is to bridge the "digital divide" by providing a fast, low-footprint browser that can run on cheap or old hardware.

Unfortunately, current versions have no support for JavaScript or CSS, and character sets other than Latin1 currently require a patch. The next version will have Unicode support, due to the switch from GTK1 to FLTK2, and CSS is being worked on. But the project is bogged down due to lack of funding, and the main developers are having to spend time on other projects so they can do stuff like eat and pay rent. Jorge Arellano Cid describes it as a chicken-and-egg problem:

People in the embedded market want a small featured browser, but don't want to invest in it. This is: if we develop it they'll use it, but there's not much interest in funding the development.

From a business perspective it makes sense. Investing in Dillo to make a full featured embedable web browser of it, is a three years plan (and who knows what the Web will look like in three years). Now if they only need an embedable web browser that evolves into a full-featured one. They could start deploying it in a year.

Unfortunately, those gaps severely limit Dillo's suitability for a large-scale "here's all you need!" project. In an ideal world, OLPC would invest some cash in Dillo so that they developers could at least finish the port to FLTK2 and basic CSS support, which would go a long way toward making it fit with the project's goals, and maybe even get started on JavaScript.

Chessbrain is kind of a cool hack, and I would respect that, if they weren't filthy spammers. Here is a typical Chessbrain spam. Notice the spam body image is hosted off of chessbrain.net. (Filthy, filthy, incompetant, spammers.

What's needed in this world isn't another clone of *zilla written in the language du jour. The problem with anything written with the Mozilla (or Gecko engine) is speed: Why should it take more than a few fractions of a second to render HTML?

And yes, it's been done already: Dillo is a blindingly-fast HTML engine/browser that runs from a binary less than 300Kb. No, it doesn't support frames, nor Javascript, nor any of the other kitchen-sink items all other browsers strive to be. Instead, Dillo sports a plug-in interface (open-source, naturally) that allows for all of this to happen, if the user wants it to happen.

So here's my suggestion: Take a cue from Dillo and go for speed, not for bloat.

Oh, and I should add that Dillo renders /. and Yahoo just fine.

Wow a new release for my secondary browser! Secondary because while it is still loading am browsing around with Dillo ...

You should try Dillo, it is screamingly fast even on slow machines. That, xterm, icewm and xemacs should be all the X11 applications you ever need to run anyway ;-).

Lynx is great, links is better, but for those that need graphics there is only one choice: DILLO

The fasted web browser on earth! Blows opera to pieces! The only problem is that it's very alpha and lacks many essential features and support for lots of common things. Keep your eyes out though. If anyone ever expands upon this engine it will blow everything completely out of the water!

From the site:
You want to hear news every 10 minutes? Fine.
You want to hear only one minute each hour? Also fine.
You want to hear the news as soon as possible? Why not.
You want news from another country? Who does not.
You want news from a specific person? Go ahead.
You want to know about a specific topic? Sure.
You want news you can trust in? That is our business.

Yeah, it's the last item that bugs me. Trust is still being vested in someone to create the trust model.

Someone has to be holding the keys and the keys here are the weights. For example, the rate of trust decay could be increased to marginalize the "small reporter." I'm not suggesting that these guys are some ill-intentioned neer-do-well's, I'm just suggesting that keys of power are merely being shifted, not eliminated.

Frankly, if I'm wrong, someone PLEASE speak up and tell me why. I've never wanted to be so wrong in my life. =)