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Dillo web browser ported to DOS

That's really cool.
Surely would work on a pentium 1 very well.

What I'd like to see is arachne with a better GUI (perhaps similar to win 9x or something).
 
oh, this is COOL! funnily enough, usotsuki and i had talked about making a Dillo port for DOS probably a year ago but we never did anything. too bad it requires a 386, but i suppose with today's web it's just not even remotely feasible anymore to cram a real web browser into conventional memory. unless you love waiting for a 25 year old MFM hard drive to swap data to/from disk. :)

i'm going to try this on my IBM PS/2 Model 80 and see how it does.
 
wow, well this is kind of ridiculous. there are a lot of filenames in the ZIP that are too long for DOS. what am i supposed to do about this? :mad:

EDIT: also, i cant even start it on my PS/2. it requires a coprocessor.
 
Mike Chambers said:
wow, well this is kind of ridiculous. there are a lot of filenames in the ZIP that are too long for DOS. what am i supposed to do about this? :mad:

EDIT: also, i cant even start it on my PS/2. it requires a coprocessor.
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Read the thread - there is a long file name version and a short file name version.

As for the coprocessor - oh well. Plan on a good 486, but probably more like a Pentium ..
 
I love Dillo! On my big box that is one of my most used browsers.

It looks pretty good as it comes up. But I appears to need a mouse. I guess I'll have to break down and dig up some adaptors and run some wires. This could be a deal breaker for me.

In Arachne, the cursor moves with the arrow keys. Although it's not particularly convenient because of the slow cursor movement, it does keep it simple.
 
Mike Chambers said:
too bad it requires a 386, but i suppose with today's web it's just not even remotely feasible anymore to cram a real web browser into conventional memory. unless you love waiting for a 25 year old MFM hard drive to swap data to/from disk. :)
Click to expand...
Given there are people out there crapping out multi-megabyte sized websites (to deliver 3k of plaintext) the 386 minimum isn't surprising if it supports images. Good thing it doesn't support javascript as the overhead of that interpreter with people taking massive dumps on websites with idiotic libraries like jquery or mootools would probably put the minimum spec out of a 386's reach.
 
Well, it took me a while to dig out a mouse driver and figure out that the easiest thing to do was just plug a serial mouse right into the MB. Anyway, my main DOS box is now pointing device enabled - much to my chagrin. :)

I can now report that DILLO works pretty well on a P-133 with plenty of RAM. Bookmarks work, and the frame can be scaled, and it renders small pages functionally. The look of the pages is not as easy to read as Arachne, but I think I saw that it has user CSS (which is actually a W3C browser requirement) so if I wanted to, I could probably make things look any way I want.

The cursor becomes non functional while the images are rendered and it takes a long time. Many (10 or more) times slower than Arachne, which was admittedly pretty fast in it's day and only slightly slower than Netscape. I have DILLO open on a Linux system with several pages open all the time, so I tried a couple of those in DOS. Slashdot.org is fairly usable, but Spiegel.de appears to be much too big for it, and Arachne as well.

Since the port is being worked on as we speak, the speed (or other functions) could easily change dramatically, so I'm not taking this test too seriously. No matter, it is already a very functional browser for DOS, and that is something to celebrate!

So now I've got three working browsers in DOS. Two that display images, and one text only. I just tried Spiegel with the Lynx text browser and it's fast and easy to read, so I'm not sure the other two are going to get much (if any) use in the long run.
 
Did everybody have a bad experience or what???? Or did nobody try this? I'd like to hear how it went for other people. :)

I've already got wattcp.cfg in my environment so I took out that line. I also changed all the others to match my own sense of organization. However, I'm still finding it is putting an "ETC" directory on the root drive despite me having changed the environment variable. Perhaps I should have the wattcp.cnf file in there. I just renamed theirs. Anyway, a program making directories without my consent is scary for me. Did that happen to anyone else?
 
Caluser2000 said:
Out of curiousity Ole Juul what enviroment are you using Netscape on and what version? Using Lynx does make though.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I think I misled you. :) I was referring to the time of the original Arachne development when Michael (the developer) was working hard to speed up the rendering. This was also the time of the "browser wars" and at one point Arachne made it to number six, which to me is absolutely extraordinary! A college student with a girlfriend (about to get married) and all the obligations of time that go with school and all that, was actually able to stand his own against the likes of Netscape. Anyway, that's the history. The facts of relevance here is that Netscape was the fastest at the time, but Arachne came close.

At that time, I had tried Windows 3.1 and been so disgusted with all the rudeness of it, that I gave it up right away. I had tried Netscape 1.0 and Cello, but without Windows, they were no longer relevant. I have a machine with DOS 5.0 and Win 3.1 for historical interest but I never type "win" and it has no browser. It would actually be fun to see Netscape again.

~ Ole
 
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