Hi,
I'm trying again to reach debian-devel, this time by subscribing first
to the list. I have also contacted your #debian-lists IRC channel for
more information on what happened, but I didn't got any reply.
I'll write a slightly shorter email here, the full email is forwarded
below (some typos corrected about dates).
The version of the Dillo web browser that you currently distribute with
Debian (3.0.5) is 10 years old. Since that version, a lot of changes
were done by the original developers, but they never got into a release
before the project was abandoned around 2017 (last email from Jorge was
from 2019). Among those changes was the support for floats or the switch
to mbedTLS instead of OpenSSL.
The 3.0.5 version has several issues on the network side, as it is
unable to properly handle TLS alerts. On the rendering side, there are
problems with floats, image ratios and with the lack of CSS units among
others.
You can easily see those yourself if you browse a bit:
$ dillo https://api.invidious.io/
...
Nav_open_url: new url='https://api.invidious.io/'
40178B7AD370:error:0A000438:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1
alert internal error:../ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1590:SSL alert
number 80
In 2024 I decided to resurrect the project and fix those and many other
problems. You can try by yourself and see the difference on the sites
side by side. Here is the new website and changelog:
https://dillo-browser.github.io/
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dillo-browser/dillo/refs/heads/master/ChangeLog
Our latest release 3.2.0 fixes A LOT of problems in the rendering side
and introduces new features like SVG support for Wikipedia math
equations. It also includes the unreleased changes from the original
developers. I presented some features and the overall state at FOSDEM
this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJp8JDg8Yg
Dillo is designed to run on very old computers and/or low power devices
like Raspberry Pi. Given that newcomers to Linux often begin with Debian
based distros, it is unlikely that they know how to build an updated
Dillo browser from source, so I'm interested in distributing already
built binaries.
Do you have any interest in updating Dillo in the Debian repository, or
should I invest my time in finding other ways to distribute a binary
package to users?
Thanks,
Rodrigo.
- Forwarded message from Rodrigo Arias Mallo -
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2025 22:23:29 +0100
From: Rodrigo Arias Mallo
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Cc: Axel Beckert
Subject: Help with Dillo package
User-Agent: Mutt/2.2.14 (516568dc) (2025-02-20)
Hi,
The Dillo web browser stopped its development in 2017, so I decided to
continue the development on my own in early 2024, even though I have not
previously contributed to the project. My current goal is to continue
with the original plan of keeping the browser fast and simple, so it can
be used in old computers and on slow networks.
I'm doing this in my free time, so the development is slow but steady.
You can read my announcement in the HN post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613
I have contacted all previous developers via email, and some of them replied
and helped me retrieve some missing parts that I have archived, but I have
been unable to reach Jorge (the lead developer). None of them seem to be
interested in developing it further.
Here is the new website and git repository:
https://dillo-browser.github.io/
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo
The old dillo.org site was lost in 2022 and is now mostly serving AI-generated
SPAM:
https://dillo-browser.github.io/dillo.org.html
https://dillo.org/post-sitemap.xml
Here is an archived copy of the original old website:
https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/index.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20220508022123/https://www.dillo.org/
We also have a new mailing list (with the recovered old archives), an IRC
channel and mastodon account:
https://lists.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/dillo-...@mailman3.com/latest
irc://irc.libera.chat/#dillo
https://fosstodon.org/@dillo
I did a FOSDEM presentation this year talking about the resurrection process
as well as new features that we added with a live demo in an old netbook:
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4100-resurrecting-the-minimalistic-dillo-web-browser/
Here is the color corrected video, as I forgot to turn off my blue filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJp8JDg8Yg
Debian currently distributes the last 3.0.5 release from 2015 before the
project development ceased, which is known to have several TLS issues (among
many others) that we have already fixed and we track the ones people reported
here:
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/issues/305
You can see all the issues that we fixed here for each release we did, they
are organized in milestones:
https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/milestones?state=cl
