I remember a friend at UCLA showed me this fancy schmatcy new Mosaic browser circa 1994 or so.
I said sure that looks nice, but why would I need this, when I have Lynx...plus Pine for newsgroups and e-mail.
Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
101–110 of 113 posts
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#102It 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.co…
Is it really so bad? Unlike computer interfaces, the web was never text-first. It was graphical from the start. The first browser was in a GUI, not a terminal. Sites have been hobbled/broken on Lynx since the very beginning. It's neat and can be convenient to have a browser that works in your terminal for simple stuff, but the web was never designed for that. It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break…
By the time it caught on, HTML did allow for very graphical web pages, and that's not even considering how popular Flash Player was when the internet had its initial growth spurt. Technically, very early versions of HTML, especially predating CSS, were closer to epub than modern HTML, but there were so few web pages it's not a meaningful argument against your supposition.
I think what's more important is that a significant portion of web pages have no more complex layout than a newspaper or slideshow, so why not make them easy to parse? Not only would it make browsing in Lynx easier, but it would work well with screen readers, which are the only way some people can browse web pages.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#103My first browser. There was another one called links which would display graphics inside the terminal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
I use http://links.twibright.com for surfing the local folders and lynx to retrieve pages. A little bit of sanity in this crazy world.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#104I 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
I don't get the appeal of using gopher. Is it just a nostalgic way of looking at the early days of the web or do you really think gopher was better than web? Might wanna read this if it's the latter: https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
Once you head these services (and more) under an atom n270 netbook or a lesser machine, you'll understand why you would love Gopher, Usenet, IRC (and bridges like Bitlbee) and Email.
Tons of JS made lots of serviceable machines obsolete. Even an i3 -and i5- is not enough today to browse the web with 2GB of RAM without a heavy ad blocker like UBlock.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#105Many 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 tur…
For HN there's gopher://hngopher.com and for the main web, links preserves
the cascaded formatting for threads. Yes, I used mosh with 2.7 KB/s too, against
a pubnix, but I used gopher too for tons of services.
Thanks to bitlbee I could talk with my SO and relatives against Telegram and https://brutaldon.org allowed me to read posts at Mastodon.
And, well, gopher://magical.fish it's unbeatable.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#106I still used Lynx as my default browser while working on ships until 2020. Satellite internet connections at sea were slow and very expensive which made Lynx a good choice. But it turned out that the text-based, distraction-free browsing could be a better experience than the same site in a modern browser. And a few sites still serve text versions, like text.npr.org. I liked Lynx enough that I would still use it back…
You would love gopher with gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org among others such as gopher://gopher.icu
Oh, and reddit: gopher://gopherddit.com
HN: gopher://gopherddit.com
But, as they stated, connecting to a pubic Unix like mosh was and is magic.
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#107Many 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 tur…
> 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 no idea this was possible. Can you explain why this works? Sounds fascinating.
Basically you are making a network connection via bluetooth. Depending on the OS you drive, there's probably a guide such as [1] to set up bluetooth via the modem adapter to act as an internet connection.
Of course it relies on both devices being able to create and maintain a good bluetooth connection.
It would be nicer if phones could run two wifi networks at the same time, allowing a mix of leach or hotspots but I guess in practical terms it's only one in a thousand type of demand.
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/internet-on-laptop-with-a-bluetooth...
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the appeal of using gopher. Is it just a nostalgic way of looking at the early days of the web or do you really think gopher was better than web? Might wanna read this if it's the latter: https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
Once you head these services (and more) under an atom n270 netbook or a lesser machine, you'll understand why you would love Gopher, Usenet, IRC (and bridges like Bitlbee) and Email. Tons of JS made lots of serviceable machines obsolete. Even an i3 -and i5- is not enough today to browse the web with 2GB of RAM without a heavy ad blocker like UBlock.
Old machines should not be used for anything serious anyway. It will lack firmware and OS updates, modern exploit mitigations and probably has a high power usage. The main reason gopher died was due to lack of openness in the protocol development. They corrected it in the early 2000's but it was too late by then
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#109A browser which you can run inside your Vim! Use it all the time in a separate tab for reading compatible websites, including HN and some documentation, very handy!
Always dreamed about Javascript engine which could render to cli though....
Re: Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
#110It 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.co…
For mastodon, https://brutadon.org works with the 'old login form'.
For the c2wiki, there are clones of it which work with plain text, but I can't remember the alternative domain. You can DDG/GG it, tho.