Dillo is six years old!

A long time ago, in December of 1999, the first release of the Dillo project was born...

The project objectives:

The democratization of internet information access.
Personal security and privacy.
High software efficiency.

... had been achieved to a good extent.

Although the first objective looks too big to undertake, we've succeeded in creating a technology to browse Internet information, while keeping the hardware and connection requirements to a minimum. Dillo, a dialup connection, and very low CPU power (i486 or PDA), are more than enough to gather from the extraordinary information repository the Internet has come to be!

Dillo is Free Software, so it can be combined with more Free Software into distributions like DSL GNU/Linux that fits in 50 MegaBytes.

The next step in the democratization of internet information access is to develop a low cost machine (desktop or PDA) and make it available to all the people that don't want to be excluded from the information age, but that don't have the wealth to afford it (colleges, kiosks, individuals...). This certainly is an endeavour for a government-like organization to undertake, as there are millions of people that can benefit from it (more).

So don't say the technology doesn't exist!

It's worth to note that the Dillo project could have been much more advanced on its technical goals than it is today. The main factor that slows our pace is not a technical one, we have the design and ideas to be much better; the problem is lack of manpower. There's only one developer working full-time on the project... If we had the funds to set the core team to work on Dillo full time, we could have brought this browser farther than where it is today a couple of years ago.

It has been a long long road. Along the way, several people have joined us and contributed to the project. This has made it possible to achieve a large list of progressive goals, advancing thus the state of the project.

The port to FLTK2 is almost finished now. It will bring antialiasing, utf-8, smaller footprint, statical binaries, lower dependencies, higher portability, etc to Dillo. The only problem to finish it quickly is lack of manpower, and that depends on funding.

It's a mixed feeling in the end. We don't have the funds yet, but we have lots of encouraging emails from our users. They keep our morale very high, and our will to keep on advancing Dillo. We love to receive them. Thanks to you all, indeed!

--
Cheers
Jorge.-

[May 2006]