Hi Jeremy, On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 08:36:59PM +0000, Jeremy Henty wrote:

I have agreed to give presentation on Dillo to my local Linux Users Group this Thursday. Naturally I'm leaving it until the last minute to write anything! :-) I am attaching my crib list of essential points to cover.

My aim is to give a very short talk covering

* project goals * history (Dillo-1, Dillo-2.0, Dillo-2.1, soon) * development model * supported features * architecture (DPI, Dw) * future

I'd very much appreciate any comments people have, particularly if you think there's anything important I have missed out. This is your chance to tell me what to tell them. (Just bear in mind that I aim to be brief, so I can't go into large amounts of detail.)

OK, here go mine.

Dillo

Fast, light, graphical browser. (stats?)

No dependencies on heavyweight desktop environments.

... and you can statically link FLTK2.

Used in many lightweight distros. One of the big names in this niche.

Aims to democratise data.

Data access: - Low HW requirement - Low bandwidth requirement (very important in rural areas) - Encourages standards (very important to be able to display the data). and privacy.

History

Dillo-1 C, Gtk-1 developed internally Developers attempted to find funding, failed stalled

Not really developed internally. It was always an open project. Some patches didn't get in though. Stalled when we realized GTK1 was a dead end.

Dillo-2 Ported to FLTK-2 (GTK-2 is too bulky) Development opened up Dillo-2.0

This one was developed internally (Sebastian and I), and opened later for all to see. The idea was to attract more developers, and to let it evolve from there (very good documentation for developers was included). You can find a good summary in its splash page: "Our users will surely enjoy this new release as it will give them the same things they're accustomed plus tabbed browsing, antialiasing, different character sets, accepting compressed pages, control over image loading, smaller footprint, fewer dependencies, better table rendering, bugfixes, improved GUI, ... In brief, a better dillo."

Dillo-2.1 (coming soon) - CSS (fonts and colours)

Now we have more developers too!

VCS, originally CVS, now Mercurial

DPI architecture (so Dillo is really a suite of programs) - implements https, cookies

Future: * It'd be great to have dillo included as a help browser in the main distros (e.g. Debian). Do you remember the times when applications came with a help button that popped information on how to use the program? There were even context-sensitive help buttons. All that vanished with the bloated browser (no time and no memory to launch it, and to find it useful). Those times may be back; dillo can be launched in less than a second and its memory footprint is really small. It provides support for standard HTML documentation with images. An API for context sensitive help is simple to develop (its basically pushing a passed URL). * Improve rendering: especially floating objects and the already good-looking CSS. * Dillo with Framebuffer support. This can be very useful for embedded devices. * Improve functionality so more sites can be used quickly! (we all know the nice feel of a site that can be used with Dillo) -- Cheers Jorge.-