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Dillo - now a graphical web browser for DOS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 27.11.2011, 20:33

> > You'd have to already have Win95, which ain't free/libre. I'm not
> picking
> > on it, just saying, it's harder to find these days. Honestly, choice of
> OS
> > matters so little in this case, more important is network drivers.
>
> I wasn't trying to push one OS over another -- I was just making an
> observation about Dillo's current performance.
I know, and please don't take it as criticism on my part. But it's true that most people don't run Win9x anymore, to them it's "old" and "dead" (no support). It's reputedly quite a beast to run on modern hardware anyways (SATA, memory limits, etc), so I've never tried. (Then again, pure DOS isn't exactly a cakewalk either.)

Also, I do have Win95 floppies (18?), but I don't think (know?) if it'll work on my USB floppy drive since I haven't tried. (May depend on BIOS, dunno, kinda silly that MS overformatted them, but when you have 18, can you blame them??)

So that's what I was thinking of.

> But you do raise a valid
> point. DOS is a good target for Dillo because of FreeDOS, which is both
> free/libre and much lighter than any Unix system could ever be.
The free/libre jab was only because some people are so overly zealous, so I took that as an excuse to half-heartedly promote FreeDOS, heh, which is so unloved by developers (and even GNU itself). Well, and mostly I was being pragmatic because you can literally download and copy FreeDOS anywhere, unlike Win95.

> (I also try to test Dillo regularly on
> ReactOS. Unfortunately it's not quite
> usable yet due to some bugs in their GDI implementation, though I have
> filed a bug report -- hopefully it will work better in their next
> release.)
Well, Win32 is much much more complex than FreeDOS, which admittedly isn't exactly simple either (lots of legacy). So yeah, they probably still consider themselves "alpha". But they've made good progress over the past few years, though I admit to not having the interest to play with it.

> Dillo-Win32 really was a stupid name choice on my part, considering I try
> to make my code as portable as possible -- the same code compiles and runs
> on Windows, DOS, OS X, and Unix (and I have binary packages available for
> most of them). How many other browsers can claim to support every major
> operating system of the last 20 years? ;-)
It's still kinda a shame that Firefox dropped Win9x so quickly. But that's life. Heck, even IE 10 will be Win7 only! I'm not sure I approve of all the modern web technologies, but I digress (again) ....

> I use r5 because that's what was marked "stable" on the DJGPP site. I'm
> not too experienced with DJGPP or DOS programming, so I've been fairly
> conservative with my package choices to err on the side of stability.
Heh. Okay, here's way more than you wanted to know:

CWSDPMI r5 was updated in 2008 with SSE support turned on by default, plus the three bugfixes from 2002, plus new contact info.

CWSDPMI r7 was updated in 2010 with 4 MB page support (faster) and thus supports up to 4 GB of RAM. With r5 you'd have to do weird things (swap to RAM disk?) for similar things, and it would be slower. CWS has called r7 "stable", and it is actually been suggested, to everyone, by the Zip Picker for quite a while now.

http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/zip-picker.html

v2misc/csdpmi7b.zip CWSDPMI - DPMI server 70 kb

> Having the ability to swap is nice, but I'd rather avoid the need to if at
> all possible.
You can disable it at runtime or permanently via CWSPARAM. Or use Japheth's HDPMI32, which is damn nice too. (N.B. HDPMI32 via GO32-V2 only reports 2.6 GB free for me, but CWSDPMI r7 via GO32-V2 reports 4 GB. But Seed7's compiler + gcc combo apparently works better with HDPMI32, go figure. Memory holes?)

> The Windows version is also statically-linked, so I can distribute it as a
> standalone executable. It's also UPX-compressed -- uncompressed it's
> around 2.2 MB, I think -- while the DOS version is not currently
> compressed.
As I just told Bernd (freedos-user) yesterday, here are the recommended options for UPXing it:

--best --lzma --all-filters (much much faster than --ultra-brute and 99% as good)
--best --lzma (if you're super duper impatient)
--best (if you don't want ANY few seconds of slowdown upon loading on an old 586 or only minimally under WinXP, whose NTVDM would then run Dillo/DOS much slower for some reason if UPX'd thus)

> One other thing adding to the DOS version's footprint is OpenSSL. The
> Windows version links to
> CyaSSL, which is much
> lighter, but I don't know how well it supports DOS. (HTTPS support
> is present in the DOS build, though unfortunately I haven't yet
> gotten it to work.)
I don't think any of us expect a miracle. The modern web is too complex, and that's even ignoring HTML 5 (ugh). So please, feel free to not stress about it. Anything is a blessing! Beggars really can't be choosers here.

> Thanks for the information -- as I mentioned, most of the footprint is
> probably my own doing rather than DJGPP limitations, but it's good to know
> for future reference.
I just wanted to be honest that such support does (mostly) exist, in case you would like to use it. Most don't, but again, a lot of people don't know it exists either.

> I'm just mildly obsessed with file size, that's all. My goal is to keep
> Dillo as small as possible, in keeping with the mainline project's
> objectives; when
> the Windows dillo.exe no longer fits on a floppy disk, I'll retire.
:rotfl: I sympathize, I really do.

Don't retire, just find a better compiler (and/or libc)! Or rewrite some stuff in asm. Don't think MinGW is the end-all-be-all. It's far from perfect (well, they all are).

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