Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022)

This how I used to read HN at work, nobody bats an eye at text in the terminal. I'm sure I could have gotten away with sipping my coffee in the morning with the orange website plastered all over my screen, but I felt like it was important to keep up appearances--call it productivity theater.

Lynx (in tmux) is still my default browser. I only go for Firefox if I really have to. Its darn <i>FAST</i>, has no remote code execution, and is typically all you need to read text on the web. Its also a good test if the web dev is full of shit :-)

I have not used Lynx interactively in ages, but when I want to save some pages of text from somewhere (typically an old web forum thread or blog) I often call lynx -dump (followed by gzip) from a script. It is an easy way to get nicely formatted text with all the HTML nonsense removed, and it also includes a list of all links from the page. Not exactly what a real archivist would do, but it works for hoarding text.

&gt; It doesn&#x27;t need a blocker for third-party scripting, service workers ... because the browser&#x27;s technology simply doesn&#x27;t recognise these page components<p>I&#x27;d never thought about it like that, but it&#x27;s a nice side-effect. You don&#x27;t have to worry about obtrusive JS, if your browser doesn&#x27;t know what JS is. :D

There are also options like Carbonyl[1] and Browsh[2] which do images and js in the terminal.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fathyb&#x2F;carbonyl">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fathyb&#x2F;carbonyl</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;browsh-org&#x2F;browsh">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;browsh-org&#x2F;browsh</a>

Do you remember the time you could buy on amazon.com with lynx? (or links2).<p>And all the other dominant online services which broke noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html to the benefit of the absurdely and grotesquely massive and complex (including their compiler) whatng web engines? This did shut the door definitely in the face of all citizen&#x2F;state sponsored&#x2F;small commercial alternatives which [could] have been super stable in time (including their SDK).<p>This is not &quot;evolution&quot; or &quot;innovation&quot;, this is a scam and planned obsolescence at accute levels.<p>You could perfectly stream a video with a dash&#x2F;HLS URL transfered to a media player (ads can be text on the web page and they can include some directly into the video stream).

IMO, a most useful thing is Lynx in DIRED mode. A great read-only directory browser - just enter a local url when you start it. For example, &lt;lynx .&gt; or &lt;lynx &#x2F;&gt; .

I use two of the mentioned browsers.<p>I have elinks as a default `tmux` pseudoterminal. I don&#x27;t use it often, but it&#x27;s always there.<p>My emacs setup uses w3m as the parser for HTML mail in VM, my email client. It works really well. &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39793342">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39793342</a>&gt;

From the article:<p>&quot;You can say goodbye to uBlock Origin, which is now virtually useless with default settings anyway.&quot;<p>Are they referring to difficulties running uBO on chrome or ... that uBO is losing the arms race against advertising infra generally ?

Related to lynx, (with images)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;w3m&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;w3m&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;links&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;links&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;reader&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;reader&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;elinks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;elinks&#x2F;</a><p>We are so glad that these tools exist for the terminal, we even still use w3m and lynx from time to time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;lynx&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;lynx&#x2F;</a><p>If you do use the terminal for your browsing I recommend ddgr as it integrates with all of the above browsers, except reader.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;ddgr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terminaltrove.com&#x2F;ddgr&#x2F;</a>

While the article mentions alternatives like links and w3m, I&#x27;d like to hear HN&#x27;s opinion on links vs w3m vs lynx.

In the 1990&#x27;s my university had a lot of dialup modem lines but only a small amount of them had PPP support. You would just get 1 terminal session. So I would dial in and then browse the web through lynx. It worked fine and was quicker because it wouldn&#x27;t waste time loading images.<p>I recently tried Usenet for the first time in 20 years. I installed slrn the text based newsreader I used in the 1990&#x27;s. It has very useful color support. I wish Usenet was more active instead of 90% spam. Having threads go for years and being able to go to the next post by hitting &quot;n&quot; instead of clicking around is a lot quicker.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slrn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slrn</a>

TFA mentions FrogFind which I&#x27;d not previously known of.<p>That seems to be a wrapper on DuckDuckGo, though it&#x27;s helpful to know that DDG has its <i>own</i> lite-mode interface which plays quite well with the terminal.<p>As noted in an earlier comment I invoke ddg search with a shell alias:<p><pre><code> ddg () { w3m &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite?q=$*&amp;kd=-1&quot; } </code></pre> The lite page itself is &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite</a>&gt;.<p>Last I&#x27;d tried using Google via w3m I found it blocking me entirely, though TBF I&#x27;ve not even tried it in months if not years.

I use w3m with vim <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yuratomo&#x2F;w3m.vim">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yuratomo&#x2F;w3m.vim</a> but just reinstalled lynx from this post after a couple of decades. This has helped with vim bindings: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fuw.edu.pl&#x2F;~jt&#x2F;lynx-FAQ&#x2F;kbd_130.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fuw.edu.pl&#x2F;~jt&#x2F;lynx-FAQ&#x2F;kbd_130.html</a> basically o for options then on for on for keyboard input &gt; VI keys. C-f works for page forward :-)

There was once a time, at least for some of us, where bandwidth was so limited and even localhost resources so scarce, as to make running Mosaic&#x2F;Netscape difficult. Lynx saved the day many times for me. Over puny dialups, over satellite links, over connections hammered by early DDoS.

Firefox (with all the foundation&#x27;s junk turned off) with noscript and ublock origin is a compromise that works for me. Lynx feels too impractical in today&#x27;s world but it&#x27;s fun to use every now and then. Just trying hn on it now it doesnt render it cleanly

I have bad memories associated with lynx due to an earlier tech job. We&#x27;d help clients install their network printers so that the applications running on the RHEL&#x2F;Centos box could see them. We did not have RDP or VNC access, but we did have on-demand SSH access to their server. So we&#x27;d end up having to SSH into the box and doing something like `elinks <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;localhost:631" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;localhost:631</a>` to bring up the CUPS interface over the terminal, and fill out all of the forms in the browser, tabbing to jump between lines and whatnot. It was a massive PITA.<p>Not lynx&#x27;s fault, of course. But memories are memories.

To add a few cents, I just tested it and it seems mandatory nowadays to add --display_charset=utf-8 option if you are viewing non-english websites. Otherwise, lynx seems to be converting non-ascii chars into ascii. [1] [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;51548306&#x2F;lynx-utf-8-support" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;51548306&#x2F;lynx-utf-8-supp...</a>

I haven&#x27;t tested many search engines but duckduckgo is very usable in lynx, it redirects you to a subdomain made for browsers that don&#x27;t use js etc.

It seems like out of Lynx, Links, and w3m, Lynx is the only one still under active development with a recent-ish release. w3m seems to be completely dead.

Self-promo: I launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol</a> blogs recently. They are powered by markdown and render just fine on lynx. You can try my blog <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol&#x2F;alvaro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;LMNO.lol&#x2F;alvaro</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenodium.com</a>.

One secret superpower of terminal-mode browsers is to tie them to shell scripts or aliases to launch a quick query.<p>DuckDuckGo, online dictionaries or etymologies, wikipedia, weather, and news are among the quick look-ups I use. Being able to do all of that in shell &#x2F; from terminal, have it in my shell history, and be able to pipe output or save to file are all wins in my book.

lynx is my goto browser these days.<p>It also supports gopher and I heard rumors it will add Gemini (protocol, the real Gemini). If so, that would be awesome.