Hi, On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 05:36:25AM -0700, j murphy wrote:

Jorge: I hope that you and your collaborators are well, and that your plans for releasing the new dillo are still on track.

Yes, still on track.

Despite the work being done on other lightweight browsers like hv3 and Twibright Labs' Links, I still prefer to use dillo,

:-)

and I need it for use on some of my older, slower machines that have less memory, and are too slow with Firefox or Opera. I'm writing to share with you a few problems that I have noticed with dillo 0.8.6:

I'll answer them below, but please just notice that the main problem we face now is lack of time from the main developers; we know about bugs, and have development plans, but we have no time or funds to quit our jobs and devote 100% to Dillo.

1)I often use a browser with tor ( https://tor.eff.org ) and privoxy ( http://www.privoxy.org )for secure browsing, and I was using dillo in this way, until I noticed (through some of the useful diagnostics at https://torcheck.xenobite.eu ) that dillo doesn't route https traffic through my web proxy correctly -- instead it seems to establish a direct connection, bypassing the proxy, despite the http_proxy setting in my dillorc file. Normal http traffic seems to be handled correctly. Does the user need to set a separate proxy for https traffic? Or does the proxy handling in dillo have a bug?

Dillo's https support is basic. It uses wget for this. You can set a proxy for wget and it should work.

2)Also, I've had some trouble with dillo's https.filter.dpi, which often sends an error message stating that it can't verify a certificate repeatedly, and sometimes launches multiple instances of itself when attempting to connect to the same website securely. This can occasionally lead to crashes in which https.filter.dpi.core is dumped, and occasionally brings down the browser as well. I realize that this information is somewhat vague, but if you'd like me to send a coredump next time it occurs, I'll do so.

Sad fact: it's a known bug. No need to send the core. The problem is that currently there's no cache for asking for a certificate, so a page with multiple https resources (e.g. images) asks several times for the same certificate flooding the communication socket.

3)The fltk downloader has one irritating glitch: when attempting to save a file, if the user to change the directory into which the file will be saved, the file name is cleared, requiring the user to type it in again, which wastes a lot of time.

Yes! This one has bitten me too. This is the default behaviuor of that FLTK dialog. If I find some time and a simple way to change that, I'll fix it.

4)When dillo is closed, many of the dpis that were spawned during a dillo session remain as zombie processes, when they ought to be terminated along with the parent dillo process. I realize that file downloads may have to be handled carefully, and may sometimes be required to remain open until completion, even after the parent dillo is closed, but it seems to me that no useful purpose is served by having the other dpis remain after dillo is closed.

dpidc stop That command tells them to quit. If they remain, that's a bug.

5)With the latest snapshots of fltk2 on my machine, the downloader doesn't refresh itself properly when multiple files are being downloaded. For instance, a user starts one download, and the downloader gui is spawned with a progress tracking entry in the downloader gui for that particular download. Then the user starts another download, but the progress tracking entry for this second download, and for subsequent downloads, is not displayed properly: it's somehow underneath the first entry, and partially obscured by it, so that control of the download or tracking of it's progress isn't possible.

Yes I noticed this too. This simple problems hopefully will be tackled by an interested developer when the code is released (before the end of September. Cross your fingers.).

I hope that this information will help you to improve your new version of dillo, if these problems have not already been addressed. If I can help, please let me know. (Of course I'm a scientist, and not really a developer, so don't expect miracles.)

Yes, your bug report is concise and self explaining. Thanks for it. I wish I had the resources to work hands on in it now. -- Cheers Jorge.-