Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser

dillo-browser.github.io

599 points

2 years ago

Hi, in mid 2022 the host dillo.org expired [0], taking down the website, mercurial repo, the mailing list and the email server used to reach the core developers of Dillo. Someone bought it and now serves a weird clone of the original page with missing content.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32448104

I felt sad as I didn't want it to die, so I got a copy of the repo from my hard disk, uploaded it to GitHub and decided to do some maintenance on the code to at least keep the build working. After some time, the folks at Atari Forum decided to use my repo to port it to the Atari platform and they managed to do it [1].

[1]: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues/34

That gave me some motivation to work a bit more on the project to prevent it from dying. So I created an organization under the name of "dillo-browser" and made a new webpage [2] with a backup of the old one.

[2]: https://dillo-browser.github.io/

With the help of Andreas Kemnade which had access to the original server, we managed to backup most of the stuff from the original website (including non-reachable pages) which I uploaded to the Archive.

In the meanwhile, I combined the support for both OpenSSL (1.1 and 3) and mbedTLS (2 and 3) as well as proper CI with rendering tests. We now build Dillo for Ubuntu, FreeBSD and macOS!

I also became familiar with the plugin mechanism in Dillo, which allows any program that uses the standard input and output to become a plugin registered to a given protocol (like file://...). I did a simple one (which is just a bash script) to read local manual pages which is handy to follow links to other pages [3], but check also the ones Charles E. Lehner did which are more advanced [4].

[3]: https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-man [4]: https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/WGEMg7AXN4o/

As of today, I'm unable to contact the main developer, Jorge Arellano Cid, which has not interacted with the mailing list for some years now. Jorge, if you read this, please contact with me (you can find my email in the git commits).

Regarding the future of Dillo, I'm planning to (finally) do the 3.1 release after some testing, and for that it would be convenient to have the help of some users to get some feedback ;-)

If you want to contribute, feel free to open a PR or send a patch (via GitHub or by email, I don't care). Check also the current issues and pull requests to see what is pending or already being working on. I will probably setup a mailing list at some point too.

Thanks! Rodrigo.

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