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Lynx is dead – Long live Browsh for text-based internet browsing
- throwaway5752 8y agoThis was discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 A number of people made this point, but this doesn't address one of the key advantages of Lynx at all: what if I need to use it while ssh'ed to a server that doesn't have X, doesn't have a browser (headless or otherwise) and I cannot or do not want to install those on it? And I have to trust your package integrity, quality of your secure coding practices, and judgement/diligence in your use of dependencies and tracking CVEs. This barely has any advantages for me over port-forwarding to the x server and using a local client, functionally, and it introduces a large potential liability. It's a cool project and you have my admiration, but making grandiose claims like this is counterproductive for (at least a good part of your target demographic) increasing Browsh adoption.
- pronoiac 8y agoIt's a use case the author didn't consider, likely for a snappier article. Even if Lynx were dead, other text-only browsers followed, and were available in, say, Ubuntu, like Links2 and ELinks.
- gojomo 8y agoClearly the next step is server-side Browsh formatting via HTTP content-negotiation. (Further, via 3rd-party proxies if a particular site can't offer it.)
- tombh 8y agoAuthor of the software here, not the author of the article. Browsh is primarily aimed at those without fast and/or cheap bandwidth, yet still want access to the modern web. There are vast swathes of the world where downloading a 10Mb website is non-trivial. There are traditionally 2 solutions to such a problem, lynx et al or VNC. Lynx et al do not support the modern web and VNC is not a text-native application. Browsh somewhat ironically also has a browser client (although not yet at feature parity with the TTY client), that further improves accessibility to the modern web for those aforementioned citizens of the slow and expensive web. Edit: Why do you think my coding standards are under any more suspicion than anyone elses? Just because Browsh is new?
- logfromblammo 8y agoFor some, "not supporting the modern web" is a feature. In electing to engage with it, we are substituting our mistrust of .JS and .CSS files out on the web with whatever engine you use to chew those up and re-render the output as text-mode approximations. It's fewer people to trust, to be certain, but the trust-by-default model has long been broken. Trust is earned, and easily lost. So absolutely yes, because it is new.
- tombh 8y agoI totally sympathise with those that are suspicious of the modern web. But Browsh is fundamentally not for them. It is for all those that don't have the luxury of cheap and fast internet, I want them to access the same information everyone else does. OK well I'm glad that the scrutiny upon me is the same as every other newcomer.
- zamadatix 8y agoHas Browsh's terminal approach been compared to traditional data proxy methods in units of quality or usability per byte?
- tombh 8y agoI'd love to see a serious breakdown of this. All I know is that anecdotally Browsh is very similar to a well configured VNC connection.
- throwaway5752 8y ago"Why do you think my coding standards are under any more suspicion than anyone elses" Because my presumption is that this is running on my servers (where I'm likely to need lynx, currently). The domain where it's running, nothing personal.
- tombh 8y agoThe domain where it's running? What does that matter if you install it yourself. You don't need any external Browse services of you run it yourself.
- msla 8y agoBrowsh killed Lynx the same way the Cadillac killed the Ford.
- craftyguy 8y agoLong live elinks! Seriously though, browsh is a neat toy, but having to depend on X and firefox is a nonstarter for many use cases. For example, I use a mailcap that sends html emails to elinks for rendering in mutt. Or, I am frequently on systems with no X server running, and/or no firefox installation.
- tombh 8y agoBrowsh and Lynx having quite different remits. Also, Browsh depends on X libs not a running X server.
- craftyguy 8y agoAh, but even X libs take up a non-trivial amount of space on a system. AND you need a whole different browser installed to even use it, since Browsh is basically just a wrapper for firefox.
- tombh 8y agoExactly. This is the price we pay to access the modern web.
- craftyguy 8y agoI consider it a feature to not be able to 'access the modern web' when the 'modern web' requires tens of MB of JS crap trying to track me. Very, very few sites I use are completely broken with JS disabled, so the default policy is to disable it. Having a cli browser that doesn't support it doesn't seem like a bad thing. If a new site doesn't load, tough luck for them.
- tombh 8y agoIndeed! I never intended for Browsh to replace lynx et al. They serve similar but distinct purposes.
- codeafin 8y agoI'm curious as to how it displays the images without first downloading the full size first (and thus not saving bandwidth), is anyone able to explain this?
- tombh 8y agoThere's no magic, Browsh is just designed to be run on a remote server where internet is fast and cheap and then accessed over SSH or the browser client from a local network that is likely slow and/or expensive.
- lkbm 8y agoIt goes through Browsh's proxy. While I think Browsh is very interesting, you can immediately see a couple issues with this. When I tried it last week, it worked pretty well for a bit, and then I got an error that all the servers were busy.
- tombh 8y agoThat sounds like you were trying the SSH demo. I've currently got that limited to 20 instances. Each one has 2Gb of RAM and a CPU, so it's not cheap. And I'm currently funding it off a modicum of donations.
- lkbm 8y agoYeah, I was using the web demo, and it was fine, but more limited, so I tried the ssh version to check YouTube (my coworker said that was working) and got the error. Obviously, I don't expect a free service like this to let me stream unlimited video. At first glance, I saw the demo server as the actual service, rather than seeing this as a tool to set up on your vpn. That eliminates the scaling issue and the privacy issues.
- codeafin 8y agoYeah, also I noticed that everything is logged, which is a little creepy too.
- shmerl 8y agoIs there any way to make full text Linux tty use true color? Would be neat to have such browser when GUI session fails.
- tombh 8y agoThat's a very good question. I don't know the answer, although I suspect the answer is no, the Linux VT doesn't support true colour. However you can at least toggle Browsh's monochrome mode with Alt+m
- shmerl 8y ago> the Linux VT doesn't support true colour. I wonder what's the reason for it. I tried searching for this, but didn't find any conclusive info. In framebuffer mode in theory it should be possible to implement.
- shmerl 8y agoI found this: https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/issues/94 https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/issues/94 https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/issues/111 https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/issues/111 But the project looks abandoned which is a pity.
- hartator 8y agoDo I have specific terminal for this, or default Mac terminal is enough? (Asking because I've some weird bugs here.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tombh 8y agoI think the default Mac terminal doesn't support true colour, which causes some rendering problems like long black lines. Either switch to monochrome move with Alt+m or install iTerm.
- mattl 8y ago> Run it right now with: docker run --rm -it nbrown/lynx lynx http://hanselman.com/ http://hanselman.com/ Or run it right now with: lynx If your use case for trying an established browser involves docker, we might want different things from a browser. I like the idea of browsh too, but it is not a browser.
- hagreet 8y agoI like this but the html.brow.sh/... service needs some sort of MitM warning.
- tombh 8y agoWhat about a little note in the footer? What could it say without implying a distrust in the service?
- tombh 8y agoAuthor of the software here, not the article. I never intended Browsh to replace Lynx et al! Browsh is firstly for people with slow and/or expensive networks and secondly a cool terminal gimmick. Sorry for stepping on any toes.
- aphextron 8y agoAre you planning MacOS support?
- tombh 8y ago`brew tap browsh-org/homebrew-browsh`
- shawn 8y agoI use `brew cask` to install firefox, and browsh adamantly refuses to use ~/Applications/Firefox.app. Not complaining, just reporting. Once it was up and running, I guess my terminal styling is conflicting with the renderer: https://i.imgur.com/5JJuLYe.png https://i.imgur.com/5JJuLYe.png EDIT: Ah, it works great in iTerm. Thanks for the cool browser.
- antirez 8y agoOh you should not be sorry at all :-) Text only browsers have very few users, any project that will bring more attention to the field is only going to benefit everybody. I bet that a number of people tested again Lynx after like 10+ years after reading all the posts about Browsh.
- tombh 8y agoThanks. That's a good point about reinvigorating interest in Lynx, I'd also consider that a success.
- antirez 8y agoMaybe browsh is just kinda of an hack (well, much more given that it works in a quite impressive way) in order to reach the creator's goal of low bandwidth usage, and is not a lynx replacement because of the way it works. But... at the same time it shows that text-only browsers, I mean proper browsers implementing the text-only rendering in a stand alone way, should get an opportunity to copy from browsh, and realize that today terminals can do more.
- tombh 8y agoThanks, yes I'd love to see some sort of formal support for pure text-based browsing, beyond things like "Reader Mode" that only make articles more accessible not UIs.
- jhare 8y agoExcept the part that lynx is still fine. Except the part that brow.sh requires X11 Except the part that Scott doesn't even know the difference because he's a M$ shill
- adamrezich 8y agoI haven't tried the browsh binary yet but trying both web versions completely mangles the text in my extremely simple text-only personal website (http://rezich.com http://rezich.com), which lynx has no problem rendering at all. Is this a deficiency of the web versions or does the binary version have this problem as well?
- NuSkooler 8y agoI want to use this, but I'd really like text only. When I say that, I don't mean "render images in text". I want text only. Text I say! Created a GitHub issue regarding this on the project, but it was promptly closed with "Press CTRL-M", which is not what I'm after nor works by default.