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I sail on merchant ships and Lynx is my primary browser on extremely slow and laggy satellite connections at sea. You really need to curate what sites you will
by kaiwen1 7y ago
I sail on merchant ships and Lynx is my primary browser on extremely slow and laggy satellite connections at sea. You really need to curate what sites you will use with it because most modern sites degrade to unusable. But when you find one that does degrade gracefully, it can be a better experience to use Lynx than a modern browser. I like Lynx so much that I sometimes use it ashore.
- JasonSage 7y agoCan you name some sites you use? I would use it more, for lack of some more of those sites that degrade gracefully.
- caioariede 7y agoAny major websites doing this well? The impression I have is that current technologies are not making it easier for Lynx to survive. In the other hand, I see people that can actually(?) browse without Javascript enabled, which makes me curious about the current state of things.
- wgerard 7y agoFunnily enough, HN actually works reasonably well in lynx.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAs long as you don’t type « g » « news.ycombinator.com » and then Lynx thinks you’re trying to access a Usenet service via NNTP. Gotta put in https:// https:// always.
- roywiggins 7y agoMetafilter always worked wonderfully, but it's been a while since I've tried it. Not sure that counts as major.
- Scoundreller 7y agoIn a way, it’s improved over the past 2 decades because nobody uses Frames anymore.
- larkeith 7y agoI don't use Lynx much, but Wikipedia, HN, Everything2 work fairly well.
- phillc73 7y agoThanks for reminding me about Everything2. I used to spend so much time on that site, but somewhat forgot about it over the years.
- catalogia 7y agohttps://lite.cnn.com/en https://lite.cnn.com/en Also, the main sites for the BBC, New York Times and Washington Post all work just fine without javascript and in terminal-based browsers (I'm partial to emacs' eww.) In my experience javascript is not necessary for a great many websites, including some major ones. Most links I click through from HN work fine without javascript, although there is some selection bias there.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TylerE 7y agoHave you tried w3m?
- mirimir 7y agoYeah, w3m is now my favorite terminal browser.
- foobarian 7y agoGoogle was lynx friendly for a long time but that seemed to have stopped this year :(. RIP Google
- dmix 7y agoIf I was the lead designer of Reddit I'd make this the goal, gracefully degrades to be accessible on Lynx but still looks great in a modern browser, instead of making it 100x more complicated for no reason. They learned nothing from Digg (or HN for that matter).
- alpaca128 7y agoI'm still using old.reddit.com instead of the modern rework because the old version is fully compatible with Vim browser plugins while the new one has all kinds of issues with keyboard-focused usage. This is a frequent symptom on websites that consist of more JS than HTML: they often won't even let you scroll the page without a mouse, let alone have UI that's visible to plugins(I never tried it, but I'd bet these same sites would also appear basically empty to screen readers etc.).
- Scoundreller 7y agoOld.reddit.com is fine until you follow someone’s link on reddit and it takes you back to the new reddit. Argh.
- antisemiotic 7y agoThere are extensions (at least for Firefox, but I think Chrome has those too) to always redirect to old reddit.
- awake 7y agoYou can also log in and set your preference to old reddit
- dredmorbius 7y agoThat does not work in my experience.
- deleted 7y ago
- megous 7y agoWhen I was developing a custom e-shop 14 years ago, using Lynx was one way it was tested too. :) It still works quite nicely in Lynx, at least for browsing. https://shakes.cz https://shakes.cz
- Scoundreller 7y agoDoes it bother you when you type in « news.ycombinator.com » and then it tries to make an NNTP connection because of the « news » sub domain? Gets me every time. Except this happens to me when I’m running low on my Canadian dataplan and need to ration data because of economic failure limitations, not true physical ones.
- zafiro17 7y agoHa - I have the same problem. Then for fun I log into some nntp sites and browse around. I often visit a webpage with lynx and save it locally, then read the file later using emacs or something else. BTW I discovered by accident that Lynx is a lovely filter for Medium.com pages. It does away with all the javascript and provides you with a terminal full of the content. When it's long form content, I find lynx delivers the promise of Medium.com better than the "modern browser" experience does.
- ignoramous 7y agoCurious: How does Opera Mini fare in comparison? During 2000s, Opera Mini created a great web browsing experience over 56k dial-ups.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI use it all the time when I’m on a 1gb SIM overseas. Works for 95% of websites. Since it’s a proxy/VPN, it also gets around paywall limits.