Campaign to Help Dillo Survive

What is Dillo?

Dillo is an efficient, fast, and portable web browser suitable for aged computers and embedded systems. Along with the small footprint comes the advantage of excellent performance as well as a strong principle of standards compliance. Dillo already runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD and almost all Unix systems. The main advantage of Dillo is obviously its efficiency and remarkably small size: it has a binary size of only around 350kB.

Dillo Status
Dillo is currently being rewritten to use the FLTK2 graphical toolkit, primarily because the previous choice of GTK+ v1 was not being developed or maintained anymore and because its successor, GTK+ v2, did not really fit Dillo's requirements - it demands too much in the way of resources. Along with the port and upgrades in functionality, something has become clear: writing this type of software requires dedication. And Dillo has now come to the point where it needs some type of consistent support to fulfill its goals and be ready to cope with today's browsing experience.

Why Your Company may want to Help Dillo?
The FLTK2 port is almost complete, but the principal author of Dillo, Jorge Arellano Cid, will not release the source code until sponsor steps up to help the project. What he would like to see is two or more of the core developers working full-time on the project - of course, this requires money. And while many companies are keen to use Dillo in their products, few are really giving back and helping with development.

Some companies pay substanial sums to license proprietary web browsers, ignoring the advantages of using an open source browser. Proprietary browsers like Opera or Access can indeed be of high quality, and provide many good features, but they don't have the community ingredient: free source code, available to everybody to study and modify for their own particular needs. This ingredient brings more flexibility to the project. Moreover, Dillo's quality and standards have always been very high along the years, and this has made Dillo what it is today.

As Dillo's source code is released under the GPL, investments in development are secured by its copyleft requirement, that if another group wishes to modify and improve Dillo, the improvements must be made public - thus others cannot "steal" Dillo and one's hard work and money. This is part of the GPL's rules. Moreover, if you want to modify Dillo, you can. You just need to release the code along with the product (ie. the modified version of Dillo). You can also ask someone else to develop some of these changes for you by e.g. offering a bounty.

Current Features
Dillo was conceived to be small and fast but it also includes many advanced features:

• Text and image rendering (PNG, JPEG, GIF)
• SSL support
• Plugin support
• Support for cookies
• and more ...
  

Pending Features and Future Work
The following features are coming soon:

• Internationalization and localization (i18n & l10n)
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) support (~ 70 % done)
• Javascript support
  

Dillo Needs Your Help
Recent development work has focused on the FLTK2 branch, and the current public GTK branch is largely stagnant except for security fixes. In the fast-moving world of browsers, if one isn't boldly forging ahead, one is dying. The Dillo project is dying for lack of help.

If you are looking for a small and solid web browser then consider Dillo. For a commercial browser, you would have to pay thousands of dollars towards a license and royalties. Consider using this money to save Dillo.

The Free and Open Source Software community will also be thankful.

Further Informations
If you would like to know more about Dillo, please visit the project's website. http://www.dillo.org/

For further information and contact email jcid [at] dillo [dot] org