Dillo is hands down the best ultra lightweight browser ever developed in my opinion. I had a Toshiba Tecra that I got from Goodwill when I had absolutely no money whatsoever in my college days, And it was at least 15 years out of date as a laptop even when I first got it. I installed Puppy Linux on it, and I had Dillo as the browser. Its ability to bring rapid web browsing to old hardware is without equal.

I still use a modern version of it now on a Pine Tab 2 tablet, which has slow enough hardware that you want something like Dillo to make it feel snappy. I just make sure to bookmark lightweight websites that are most agreeable to Dillo's strip down versions of web pages.

It's one of the reasons I feel like Linux on the desktop in the 00s and 2010s had the superpower of making ancient hardware nearly up to par with modern hardware or at least meaningfully closing the gap.

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ajxs 8 hours ago | parent [-]

How does it compare with NetSurf? Whenever I'm setting up Linux, I usually start with NetSurf to download the other requirements. I'll have to give Dillo a look.

	▲	glenstein 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I consider Netsurf to be a beautiful and excellently well-done browser in its own right, so you can't go wrong with either. But by comparison, Dillo is much more lightweight than even Netsurf (!!), much more brutalist, and a bit more idiosyncratic and the kind of texture and feel of how tabs behave, how you handle bookmarks, how you do searches. Dillo uses fltk while netsurf uses gtk3, and a lot of the resource usage savings in differences in vibe and feel come from that by itself. Netsurf is much more familiar if your baseline is standard modern browsers, and Netsurf does a better job of respecting CSS and rendering pages the way they should look. Dillo can take a little bit of getting used to but it's a usable text oriented browser that I think is probably as good as it can possibly get in terms of minimalist use of resources, although at a rather significant compromise in not rendering many web pages accurately or using JavaScript or having an interface intuitive to the average person.