Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

It would be up to the browser to render HTML sensibly. Use a browser that can.

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)

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 :)

It is 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:

  $ lynx https://mastodon.social/
  […]
  To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript.
  Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your
  platform.

The C2 Wiki does not load either:

  $ lynx https://wiki.c2.com/
  […]
  javascript required to view this site
                   why

To their credit, at least they use the 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:

  lynx https://danluu.com/            # Mostly okay but some needed spaces missing
  lynx https://en.wikipedia.org/      # Okay, but a large wall of links on top
  lynx https://irreal.org/blog/       # Renders fine
  lynx https://libera.chat/           # Mostly fine
  lynx https://news.ycombinator.com/  # Of course!
  lynx https://sachachua.com/         # Mostly fine
  lynx https://shkspr.mobi/           # Renders really well
  lynx https://susam.net/             # Disclosure: This is mine
  lynx https://norvig.com/            # A classic!
  lynx https://nullprogram.com/       # Also pretty good

If you have more examples, please comment, and I'll add them to this list in the two hour edit window I have.

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. The links may appear like this:

  HomeBlogRSSAboutCodebergMastodon

Or, in a list of articles, dates and titles may appear jammed together:

  14 Mar 2025The Lost Art of Dual Booting
  15 Mar 2025Some Forgotten Features of Gopher 
  16 Mar 2025My Favourite DOS Games

The missing spaces aren't obvious in a graphical browser due to the CSS styling hiding the issue, but in a text-based one, the issue becomes apparent. 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.

I have to add https://nullprogram.com, just because of the care the author took to have it work better in lynx[1]:

    Just in case you haven’t tried it, the blog also works really well with terminal-based browsers, such as Lynx and ELinks. Go ahead and give it a shot. The header that normally appears at the top of the page is actually at the bottom of the HTML document structure. It’s out of the way for browsers that ignore CSS.

[1] https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/09/01/