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The lightweight and open-source Dillo web browser written in the FLTK 1.3 GUI toolkit was brought back to life by developer Rodrigo Arias Mallo after almost a decade, releasing version 3.1 with major enhancements.
Highlights of Dillo 3.1 include support for floating HTML elements, which involved a big redesign, support for OpenSSL, LibreSSL, and Mbed TLS 2 and 3 for HTTPS by default, automatic HTML rendering tests, improved and extended Dillo manual, and a CI pipeline to build Dillo on Ubuntu, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows.
This release also brings a redesign of widget sizes, support for min-width, max-width, min-height, max-height, and display: inline-block CSS elements, new adjust_min_width and adjust_table_min_width configuration options, support for HTML5 character references, as well as improved recognition of cookies dates.
Dillo 3.1 also improves the detection of XHTML documents, adds a http_force_https mode to force HTTP connections through HTTPS, adds support for the <main> HTML tag, expands the home tilde ‘~’ in the file plugin, simplifies bookmark DPI page style and improves readability, and improves DuckDuckGo search links.
It also adds a scroll_step option to control the mouse wheel’s vertical step and a ui_tab_height option to control the tab height, and replaces the flag --enable-ssl configuration option with --enable-tls and enables TLS support by default for HTTPS.
For improved responsiveness, Dillo now gives images lower priority when requesting resources. Other than that, users will now be able to switch tabs using the mouse wheel by default. Of course, there are also many bug and crash fixes, so make sure you check the release notes for extra reading.
Dillo 3.1 is available for download from the project’s GitHub page and it’s dedicated in memory of Sebastian Geerken, the main developer of the layout engine, who passed in 2016.
Unfortunately, Dillo is only provided as a source tarball that you’ll have to manually compile on your GNU/Linux distribution. At the moment of writing, the developers don’t offer a Flatpak, AppImage, or Snap universal binary package, but you may be able to install it from your distro’s repositories.
However, Dillo is a very old web browser that doesn’t support many modern websites, including ours and popular websites like YouTube. Even if it was brought back to life, I don’t see any real use for it in 2024.
Last updated 6 days ago
