Hi, I read this thread and every post on here, and decided to respond. I really love dillo and am frustrated that I still have to use other hogs such as firefox and would really love to see it move so that I don't have to. --- Jorge Arellano Cid <jcid@dillo.org> wrote:
Although I certainly regard the "i18n" patch-gathering as a good thing for the user, IMO dillo-gtk1 is a dead end from the development point of view (even if the gathered patches were in line with the rest of dillo's design, which is not the case).
GTK1 is an abandoned library, it has become the much bigger, slower and capable GTK2, precisely because it was not suited for solving certain "desktop" problems.
You can read Owen Taylor's "Internationalization in GTK+" paper for a more solid basis on i18n design decisions (Owen is one of the main authors of GTK1 and GTK2).
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/gtki18n/index.html
It can be thought that Dillo "i18n" would have more hope if ported to GTK2. Following this line, we made some benchmarks, investigated in more depth, I had some emails with Owen, we had a discussion in the mailing list, and it turned out that:
* GTK2 could double Dillo's footprint. * GTK2 has different expose model that woul require a redesign of the incremental rendering inside Dillo. * Dillo would become much slower and resource hungry.
If Dillo becomes slower and has a bigger footprint, its main advantages start to dissapear when compared with let's say Firefox or Opera. In that case even I'd prefer to wait a bit longer for Firefox to start and then have a featureful browser.
Dillo's main advantage is a tradeoff of features for speed. If the speed edge disappears, what do we have?
In short, after lots of investigation we decided to port Dillo to FLTK2 (Although there's plenty of information about this in the mailing list, I realize it would be good to recapitulate this story and make this information together with future plans available from one page in our site. This mail is the first step in that direction).
I agree, but when are you planning on releasing the FLTK2 port? I think a lot of people are waiting for this before they even start doing anything with developing more, etc.
With regard to Javascript, yes we also agree that we need to support some scripting language (ECMA or whatever). We've developed in this direction too (For instance we have the DOM code almost ready, and dpi can provide the link to the script interpreter; we even have developed a prototype for scheme).
Tabs are easy to add too, and although I hate frames, they should be supported (sigh). BTW, I always had this in mind and that's why it was easy to make a frames patch. The networking code was already designed for the parallelism this task requires. It's a matter of implementing its rendering.
Somehow people tend to believe that features are not there because the core team doesn't want them. Or even because they do not have room in a minimalistic browser. This is _not_ true. The main reason is lack of manpower.
Agreed: no question. Developing any product, much less a fabulous one like dillo, needs huge manpower.
The other reasons are the GTK1 issue explained above and that these patches were not in line with the rest of the design, and that they break several things too (I've always asked authors to let their users know what each patch breaks).
Having another design idea is valid, but it can't be pushed against those who think different (see LKML for examples! ;-). Forks had been announced but none thrived.
I also believe that Dillo shouldn't try to get CSS support; the last thing I want is yet another browser with buggy CSS that I have to design around. If Dillo is going to support CSS, I don't think the support should become a part of a stable release of Dillo until Dillo can render ACID2 perfectly. A site that uses CSS is perfectly usable, albeit a bit ugly, in a browser that doesn't have CSS.
We think Dillo needs CSS, so don't panic dillo-dev subscribers! :-)
As a matter of fact, the widget style structures inside Dillo are shaped for CSS, and we presented a CSS parser prototype at FOSDEM 2005. Merging the CSS parser into the current tree would start CSS support.
As for your concerns, disabling this is a piece of cake.
Anyway, these are just my 2 millicents. I understand that it takes either real code or real money to make these changes real, and since I'm currently offering neither, feel free to cheerfully ignore my thoughts or to flame me to a crisp. :)
Real money is a problem I haven't figured how to solve yet.
For instance, there're plenty of embedded-focused companies that are interested, or already working with Dillo. They seem to prefer to wait for us to develop, with a view to lower costs, rather than to contribute (patches or money) or fund some development. These are the cheap companies.
Other companies have interest and money to fund and foster Dillo development. The problem here is that managers prefer to make a choice for the "tried and true" and not to risk their jobs in the company in case of failure.
I don't know yet how to solve the second problem. Any help is welcomed.
I don't see this dollars-problem being solved. One of the issues is that dillo tries to be too strict in some regard. For instance, the https is disabled by default and has to be enabled in the source code. Most users perhaps take a binary from some RPM or somewhere, so it stays default most of the time. It would really be nice if this was enabled/disabled by means of a "switch" and one did not have to recompile the whole source code. I must say that this does not solve the dollars question, but this is an issue worth considering. I doubt that you can get commercial vendors involved in this effort? The only other option is contributions, and even that is perhaps finite, especially if stuff people would like to see in their favorite browser is not going to show up. So, that leaves the contributions in terms of time and effort. Have you considered moving dillo to a community project model? I know that there are core developers and they could vet things submitted, but it would be better if there were more contributor developers who submitted their improvements. Something like, for instance, the R project in statistical computing. Or for that matter, octave or xemacs and the like. Somehow, somewhere earlier on, I got the impression that contributions are not really encouraged: if it does not meet the core team's objectives, it is not cared for. Maybe what I am suggesting is already done and maybe this is a false impression on my part, and I am sorry if that is so. I only know that I want dillo to succeed and replace firefox, the so-called lightweight browser. Thanks for reading! Best wishes, Trotter. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com