Re: URL field / Loading page images / Refreshing DNS cache

Jorge Arellano Cid <[email protected]> writes:

[...]
>> As far as I can see, one can use the context menu to download
>> individual images on a page, or use the panel to toggle image
>> loading.  But if one wants not to download images in general, but to
>> download all the images for some one page (e.g., a weather forecast
>> page), then one has to toggle downloading of images on and then off
>> again.  Maybe a command could be added to KeysCommand_t in keys.hh,
>> bound by default to something like Ctrl-i in keys.cc, with a
>> corresponding call to a_Html_load_images() in handle() in ui.cc?
>
>   This is interesting. 
>
>> To make the switch to the current snapshot, I had, sadly, to terminate
>> an instance of 3.0.5 that had been running continuously for 90 days
>> without any issues.
>
>   Wow, it's good to know it can last that long.
>
>   What you describe here is very interesting, in a way I've
> come to suspect most users don't have the slightest clue.
>
>   I mean, everyone of us (as dillo users) have *different* use cases.
> There's no way we can guess what other people are doing outside of
> our awareness realm.
>
>   Now, you're not only a casual user, but one that uses dillo *a lot*,
> and appreciate it as an everyday tool.
>
>   That being stated, we are very interested in knowing your use case,
> and all the details of it. There's potentially a lot we can learn from it,
> and also improve yours/and-the-generic user experience as a result of
> this learning.
>
>   So please elaborate on why you like to have it running for that long time,
> what do you do with it, how you do it, what problem does it solve that other
> tools don't, why is it your choice. What you'd wish it had.

I had been using Firefox (and still do, for trusted sites that require
javascript), but looked around for another browser when the option to
turn off javascript was removed from the preferences dialog -- when
javascript is so often the vulnerability behind exploits, I didn't
want a browser hoisting in javascript from all over the Internet at
its own discretion.  (It is still possible to turn javascript off in
Firefox if one starts from a script that invokes a prefs.js with a
legacy `user_pref("javascript.enabled", false);', or from the internal
about:config page, but:) Dillo was one of the few browsers without
javascript, and when I checked it out, I found that I agreed very much
with Dillo's stated philosophy.  And it has been my principal browser
ever since.  In fact, along with an xterm and Emacs, it's one of the
three apps always running on my machine.

Things I like about Dillo:

Dillo doesn't even include javascript.  (I cringe a bit when there is
talk on the list about the possibility of including it -- if it is
included at some point, I hope that there will be a #define to exclude
that code at compile time.)

Dillo is small and fast, which is nice not only for general browsing,
but when invoking it through, e.g., Emacs to open a link.

Dillo let's me configure things the way I like, and when it doesn't do
something I want, the code base is accessible enough that I can modify
it to do so.  (I had in fact already implemented the suggestions I
made, but didn't share any patches because, even beyond being an
amateur, my hacks tend to be on the ugly side -- the loading of images
per page, for example, required adding #include "html.hh" to ui.cc,
indicating that I am certainly violating some logic of organization
and encapsulation.)

Dillo isn't phoning home or doing anything else behind my back, and it
let's me easily block ad and other such sites in domainrc.

Dillo doesn't try to do all sorts of exotic things, or invoke external
apps to do them, with all of the potential security risks.  With other
browsers, you have to do a lot of work to try to prevent this sort of
automagical behavior, and even if it's possible, you aren't left
feeling at all confident about having prevented it.

Like you, I like that Dillo caches DNS lookups, but of course IP
addresses change from time to time for legitimate reasons, so there
does need to be a way to flush the cache.  Johannes's patch is a good
one, but I also still like the idea of using the cache until I need it
to refresh.  Of course, one could simply start a new instance of
Dillo, but I also like that it caches pages in a way that allows me to
open a link to a previously visited page off-line, without trying to
reconnect and reload it.  And -- possibly a unique personal
idiosyncrasy -- I like to see links I have visited displayed as
visited.  Other than that, there really isn't any reason not to be
firing up a fresh instance of Dillo whenever it is needed.

And probably a lot of other virtues in Dillo that just aren't coming
to mind right now.

>   Some things may be possible, others not, a few may be solved in different
> ways, etc. Just learning about those key tasks, or improving a single one,
> would be a big gain for all of us.
>
>   Your feedback as a dillo power-user is not only welcomed, it's asked for!
>
>
>> Thanks again for all your hard work!
>
>   Ack!
>
>
> @all: if you're a dillo power-user, let us know about it!