Kudos to the folks keeping it running.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
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17 Comments
rich_sasha
How usable is Lynx for modern Internet?
I would love a browser I can operate within tmux, but how does it stack against the modern javascript-laden ecosystem?
SweetSoftPillow
Can we run it in Chrome?
vogelke
I use it for two things:
* saving webpages as text with the links nicely organized at the bottom, and
* calling it from mutt (MUA) to display HTML parts of mail messages.
It works great and it's consistent.
donatj
Very early in my Linux days in the early 2000s I was bound and determined to learn how to use Lynx as I thought the skill would be a necessity for maintaining servers. Being able to look up issues online and what not.
Little did I realize that 99% of the time I would be SSHed in from a full desktop with a standard browser, and Lynx has just been kind of a fun novelty for me.
febeling
I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/
sylware
Proud user of noscript/basic (x)html browsers here.
Lynx and links (and I wanted to _code_ my own using netsurf libraries).
Restoring noscript/basic (x)html will only happen with hardcore regulation (or "tarif"/"gigantic fines"… same same…).
This is critical for the web, since that makes developing real-life alternative browsers a reasonable task from many pertinent perspectives.
The current technical landscape of the web is a disaster: a cartel of 2.5 absurdely and grotesquely gigantic web engines written in the most complex computer language out there which requires a compiler on the same complexity level… and there are only 2 of them from roughly from the same cartel/mob.
It seems that technical interop of the web with a very simple standard, stable in time and good enough to do the job is a 'competitive' issue of the small vs the big and should be handle by regulating administrations.
Remember, tons of web sites were noscript/basic (x)html compatible and doing a more than enough good job already… without insane technical dependencies…
anonzzzies
I cannot wait until vision llms are cheap and fast enough (ran locally of course) to just browse everything with, then I can return to browsing with lynx, or rather, emacs.
angled
Lynx was great, but w3m + gpm for mouse input + fb for graphics was a revelation.
atribecalledqst
Years ago (like 2013), I had an actual use case for lynx, which was that I was staying at a hotel long-term and I couldn't access the Wi-Fi landing page from my browser for some reason. But I could hit it from lynx, so I'd just log in from there every day.
Never had to do that since, but it sure saved my ass back then…
camel-cdr
I use thr shell alias "?" for websearch with lynx.
So "$ ? search term"
nbenitezl
Oh, this brings back memories of my first steps with Gentoo linux, when I failed at setting up the display (XFree86 back then) or configure it properly, I remember browsing Gentoo wiki pages with Lynx to bring it back.
noufalibrahim
My first browser. There was another one called links which would display graphics inside the terminal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
anthk
I still use it with:
gopher://hngopher.com (for actual HN I use Links)
gopher://magical.fish (Huge portal)
gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia (Internet Archive)
gopher://sdf.org (Tech blogs and code mainly)
https://neuters.de (news)
https://m.xkcd.com and a external viewer
andai
Many moons ago I was on a constrained internet connection — I set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.
I had like 2KB/s.
This made most of the internet unusable, but it turns out the parts I care about are text. So I just browsed it through a text browser.
This didn't really work either, because it turns out web protocols don't work very well over 2KB/s.
So I browsed the internet by connecting to a $1 VPS (very fast internet!) over Mosh (which is like SSH, but more efficient and resilient). So that way, it would only send the actual bytes of text to me.
I mostly browsed HN and the linked articles at that point.
The browser that rendered HN the best in those days was w3m. I remember it had indentation and even mouse / scrolling support. I tried lynx too and it was good too, but I went with w3m in the end.
I see w3m hasn't been updated in 15 years, but it's probably still better for reading HN, whose UI hasn't changed for longer than that! I will have to give them both a spin :)
susam
It's unfortunate that modern web development has led to websites so complex that they either break entirely or look terrible in text-based browsers like Lynx. Take Mastodon, for example:
The C2 Wiki does not load either:
To their credit, at least they use the <noscript> tag to display the above notices. Some websites don't even bother with that. But there are many old school websites that still load fine to varying degrees:
While JavaScript has its place, I believe that websites that focus on delivering primarily text content could prioritise working well in TUI browsers. Sometimes testing it with text-based browsers may even show fundamental issues with your HTML. For example, several times, I've seen that multiple navigation links next to each other have no whitespace between them. Pick the first example from the above list. While most of the content appears fine, the dates and post titles are sticking together without any space in between. Similar problem in the footer which appears like this:
The first example in the previous list too suffers from a similar issue. The number of text-based web users may be shrinking, but there are some of us who still browse the web using tools like lynx, w3m, and M-x eww, at least occasionally.
miki123211
I wish there was a Lynx-like (or, even better, Edbrowse-like) web browser, but powered by something like headless Chromium underneath.
This way, you could have an extremely low-resource user terminal and/or a laptop on an extremely constrained connection, and still be able to use a modern web by connecting to a more powerful server.
You could even share such servers between users. Because people aren't all using the web at the same time, you could actually utilize that server capacity a lot more than you can do with laptops.
It would be even better integrated with an LLM (especially with extremely slow / unreliable / high latency connections).
seoulbigchris
When I first was exposed to Lynx, I was also working on a project using the Lynx realtime Posix OS. To my knowledge, the two aren't related other than by name. I checked a couple of years ago, Lynx OS still exists but under a different name.