Dillo : Light Weight webbrowser for Linux hits version 2.0

Dushmantha Charaka October 18, 2008 0 Comments

Dillo is a Multi platform lightweight web browser that has been in development for close to 8 years now, it is feature rich with features like Tabbed Browsing , support for multiple languages , anti-aliased text etc while occupying an extremely small memory footprint.

Dillo has been used as default web browser by a number of lightweight Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux , VectorLinux etc. Dillo supports CGI Forms , SSL , Cookies though it misses support for Javascript which limits its usage slightly. However , Dillo was never intended to replace normal web browser instead it was designed to be usable on simplest of hardware(like really old computers , or may be PDA's ) for displaying simple web pages quickly and accurately which it does extremely well. Dillo could be particularly useful for Kiosk terminals where we don't have access to expensive hardware needed for running modern web browsers. Also Dillo has been used extensively by Web Developers to check for Web comply-ability of there websites using bug meter feature in Dillo.

This is how Dillo's website describes Bug Meter :

Dillo's bug meter shows the number of detected bugs inside a web page. The bugs are caught at parsing time, and therefore the error messages also show the line where they occur and provide a hint of what was expected instead!

Dillo with version 2.0 has moved to FLTK2(Fast Light Wight Toolkit ) from GTK , which has made Dillo even faster . I found on a fairly modern computer astonishingly , Dillo occupied Less then 3 MB of memory to render a fairly complex web page.

Impressed , you can easily install Dillo by issuing the following command in the Terminal(Application -> Accessories -> Terminal ) window:

wget http://misc.andi.de1.cc/dillo/dillo_2.0-1_i386.deb

and

sudo dpkg - i dillo_2.0-1_i386.deb

If the above command worked without any problem , you should have Dillo installed properly . You can Launch Dillo from (Applications -> Internet -> Dillo ).