Tracking problems of Dillo 3.0.5 on Debian

[rodarima]

Debian continues to ship with Dillo 3.0.5, even if we have made already two releases since we took over the maintenace (see this HN post). For reference, Dillo 3.0.5 was released in 2015.

Several people are affected by issues that were fixed either by the original developers of Dillo (but never made it to a release) or fixed by us, both of which are solved in the last release (as of now, 3.1.1).

Until now, I believed that it was somewhat better to at least have 3.0.5 on the Debian repos, but as I read more and more users complaining that it doesn't work at all, I'm starting to change my mind about it. Specially, because those issues were already fixed. Users are simply assuming that Dillo is broken, and they just go to find another browser.

Other distributions like Ubuntu, Raspbian or Linux Mint use the Debian packages, so they also include the outdated Dillo. This is particularly painful, as the users are typically newcomers, and there is not much chance they will even consider they are using an almost 10 year old release.

I'll try to keep here a list of those issues I find on the web, sorted by time.

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2024-11-06 - https://youtu.be/RjzQNngysh4?t=371

Sometimes I have trouble visiting this website (api.invidious.io), like I think it may be block in some DNS...

On Dillo 3.0.5-7+b1 it doesn't work:

Nav_open_url: new url='https://api.invidious.io/'
** ERROR **: [Dpi_read_comm_keys] No such file or directory
Dpi_blocking_start_dpid: try 1
[dpid]: a_Misc_mksecret: 95fcad05
dpid started
40776AE697730000:error:0A000438:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert internal error:../ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1590:SSL alert number 80

This is probably related to the missing handling of TLS alerts on OpenSSL. On Dillo 3.1.1 it works fine:

---

2024-11-22 - https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2270962

I launched Dillo, it locked up, or at least failed to connect with connect.raspberrypi.com. Wifi is up as sudo apt update worked fine.
[...]
Do any of the images include midori or a browser that a 2 Zero can actually launch and use?

Similar SSL problem on Dillo 3.0.5-7+b1:

Nav_open_url: new url='https://connect.raspberrypi.com/'
Nav_open_url: new url='https://connect.raspberrypi.com/devices'
Nav_open_url: new url='https://connect.raspberrypi.com/sign-in'
NumPendingStyleSheets=1
NumPendingStyleSheets=2
NumPendingStyleSheets=3
40D74863E4710000:error:0A000410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure:../ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1590:SSL alert number 40
40E7A918607B0000:error:0A000410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure:../ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1590:SSL alert number 40

But works fine on Dillo 3.1.1, although it probably require enabling cookies to login.

[xlex8]

Here is a reference to Dillo on Mastodon today, the user is commenting about https not working on Ubuntu:

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/113579997625738264