Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.
Cheers to everybody (and there were many) who sent me notes over the past few days, while I was furiously building and rebuilding the Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix, about the release of Dillo-2.0. Thanks very much for thinking of me.
In fact, I caught it the day after it was released, and got my hands on the .deb files that someone built off this page. And, surprise surprise, it looks a lot like Dillo “1” … just a little … different.
But that’s a good thing, right? I mean, all the good parts are still in there: It’s incredibly fast, it renders sort of … close to intended, and the interface is much smoother now. And the download manager is very cool. And judging by the changelog, it’s not just the aesthetic that has been adjusted.
Personally I’m looking forward to more releases of this one. It’s a little scruffy around the edges right now, and of course, point-oh versions are always a little rocky, but I think this might take over on most of my machines, just for being both fast and attractive … for once. 😉
And no, don’t look for it in Intrepid. 🙄
They should take some hints from the patched Dillo version, especially concerning tabs, that implementation was much superior: possibility of having the tab bar always showing, tabs loading in the background, closing tabs with a middle mouse click, etc.
One thing that I feel is quite strange, and I have tested this in parallel: the new version loads pages much, much faster. Well, strange isn’t quite the word, it’s just… so good it almost feels strange.
BTW, is there anyway one can customize FLTK’s theme? I’d like to, at least, change the font sizes in Dillo’s dialogs and address bar, because they’re much bigger than what I have setup elsewhere.
I concur, on all points. But I also get the feeling that this is something that’s in progress, so I’m anticipating 2.1. I do like the speed and the look though.
Speaking of the look, I’ll have to get started with customizing FLTK too. I can’t think of any applications I use regularly that have FLTK underpinnings, so that’s new ground for me. But if Dillo is going to use it, and if Dillo 2.x continues to impress me, then I’ll have to pull up my socks and start learning … again. … 🙄
For what it’s worth, 2 of my favorite FLTK apps are alsamixergui (at least as fast as the console mixer, and with the same keyboard controls) and fldiff (graphical diff that’s much more straightforward than console diff).
It might be worth mentioning that Dillo has a nice built-in file browser. Put, for example, “file:///etc” in the address bar and you get a listing of the directory contents, complete with a parent-folder link. Html files (of course), plain text files and image files can all be viewed in a flash. As long as you dont’t want to edit anything it’s a much faster way of looking around than, for example, pcmanfm + leafpad + gpicview. 🙂
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