7 ms·

Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

229 points by jahnu 2y ago

Kudos to the folks keeping it running. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rich_sasha 2y ago
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?
- delamon 2y ago
  The Wiki has the answer: Unlike most web browsers, Lynx does not support JavaScript, which many websites require to work correctly.
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    Well, yes. But what's the browsing experience like then? I appreciate I can just install it and try, but tips for any long time users would be more insightful I think.
- eadmund 2y ago
  Well-written websites look great it it; poorly-written ones look terrible or are blank pages. That’s the same as with any other text-mode browser. A lot of sites require Javascript to function, even when their actual functionality does not (pro tip: if you use Javascript to display text, show images or create links, you are doing it wrong). That’s a real shame. As a general rule, the best sites work great, and the worst ones don’t work at all. This is not entirely a bad thing! It cna make web browsing less distracting. I often use a text-mode browser as a primary, and fall back to Firefox when using some Javascript-laden monstrosity.
- bdeshi 2y ago
  elinks is another textmode web browser that supports some javascript. https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/ https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/
- mrweasel 2y ago
  The problem, for the sites I'm interested in, typically isn't the lack of JavaScript, but how the sites layout. Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article. If you have website, which have actual content (text), it's pretty easy to ensure that it looks good and works in Lynx, with minimal effort.
  - wantless 2y ago
    Site layout can definately be an annoyance browsing in text. More accessible sites will offer a Jump to Content link near the top, which is the case with Wikipedia. In Lynx, hitting the ">" to move down a row of links then right arrow (or corresponding vim motion if configured) brings you adjacent to the article TOC and significantly closer to the article text.
  - basscomm 2y ago
    > Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article. Wikipedia has a link at the top of the page that is labeled 'jump to content' that skips over all of the menu gunk at the top. Several other sites also do this
- anenefan 2y ago
  Lynx is still valuable even if one doesn't use it to browse the web. It's been a while but when large sites would every so often alter their link landscape, via pruning or renaming, Lynx was a useful tool when looking for similar pages that may not be displayed by search engines with the given query parameters, (non matching name,) and more often it was Lynx I'd use as it was quick to dump most of the links to search though later on if I needed to rather than deploy wget's spider mode lynx -dump -listonly -nonumbers http://foobar.com/ http://foobar.com/ >foobar.txt
- wantless 2y ago
  This response was written from Lynx within a tmux session: Hacker News remains a notable bastion of simplicity, usability, and accessibility. Lynx is my primary browswer, but precisely because I desire a degree of separation from the "modern" internet. This requires curation. Many sites simply do not work. But this practice gives me space to reconsider what I actually want from the web and what the web wants from me.
SweetSoftPillow 2y ago
Can we run it in Chrome?
- haunter 2y ago
  Well apparently you can compile it to wasm so probably yes? https://gist.github.com/Potherca/866dfc72de9bfe0fc5627945446826a6 https://gist.github.com/Potherca/866dfc72de9bfe0fc5627945446...
vogelke 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/ https://lynx.browser.org/
- eviks 2y ago
  You mean unreadable on mobile due to tiny text?
  - galago 2y ago
    Should we blame an old timey basic webpage for its lack of complexity or should we blame a modern browser for not accommodating the web in its most simple form?
    - eviks 2y ago
      We can walk and chew gum? Also, how much complexity do you think is needed to fix this by the webpage?
      - tempodox 2y ago
        It would be up to the browser to render HTML sensibly. Use a browser that can.
        SkiFire13 2y ago
        There is a specification that says how it should be rendered. I definitely don't want every browser to decide how to render my webpage, that would just make development so much harder and complex.
  - im3w1l 2y ago
    Looked fine for me on mobile.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
    I’m sorry to hear that lunch to zoom is hard on your fingers
sylware 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
Lynx was great, but w3m + gpm for mouse input + fb for graphics was a revelation.
atribecalledqst 2y ago
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 2y ago
I use thr shell alias "?" for websearch with lynx. So "$ ? search term"
nbenitezl 2y ago
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.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Yeah, it was "links" in my case I believe. Not sure.
  - Arubis 2y ago
    That and `elinks` were both viable and slightly more layout-focused.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
- mediumsmart 2y ago
  I use http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com for surfing the local folders and lynx to retrieve pages. A little bit of sanity in this crazy world.
anthk 2y ago
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 https://neuters.de (news) https://m.xkcd.com https://m.xkcd.com and a external viewer
- XzetaU8 2y ago
  Or you can use Dillo browser with the gopher plugin https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-gopher https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-gopher
- udev4096 2y ago
  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 https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
  - anthk 2y ago
    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.
    - udev4096 2y ago
      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
      - anthk 2y ago
andai 2y ago
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 :)
- gptoperator05 2y ago
  [dead]
- nasretdinov 2y ago
  Yeah mosh works really well in those kinds of scenarios. My provider once had an outage where they dropped 50% of all packets, which rendered most of the internet completely unusable. I was able to connect to my VPS via mosh (it took 6 attempts since it uses SSH for the initial handshake), and then mosh + w3m worked essentially the same as if no packet drops even existed. Feels like magic
- solardev 2y ago
  These days, I wonder if it'd be better to just sic a LLM API on it and have it stream you the text summary back?
- lawrenceyan 2y ago
  > 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.
susam 2y ago
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 <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: 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.
- TachyonicBytes 2y ago
  I have to add https://nullprogram.com 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/ https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/09/01/
miki123211 2y ago
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).
- yaky 2y ago
  There is browsh, which uses Firefox underneath: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh And looks like Carbonyl uses Chrome: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
seoulbigchris 2y ago
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.
kaiwen1 2y ago
I 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 on land until the habit faded.
- anthk 2y ago
  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.
kotaKat 2y ago
For a while I was using https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ in MacOS to get Lynx as a 'native' browser. It was a nifty wrapper. Sadly lost to time... and 32-bit only. :(
esotericwarfare 2y ago
You can render JS only websites using chromium headless like this: chromium --headless example.com --disable-gpu --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --dump-dom --virtual-time-budget=10000 --window-size=800,600 | sed "s|<head>|<head><base href=example.com>|g" | lynx -stdin
- fouc 2y ago
  good idea, firefox headless would be my choice though (I think all chromium-based browsers should be boycotted)
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    Check browsh out then.
486sx33 2y ago
Like most people my age, my first Internet experience at home was with lynx on a Unix shell. We shared credentials for an account at the school board that we scored from a teachers aid. It was sweet to dial into the school board (same numbers all the teachers used!) and surf around in text only lynx.
john-tells-all 2y ago
As a web developer, everything is in the editor. A super-fast way to preview my web page changes is: lynx --dump localhost:8000/mypage.html Put that in a loop. My server or frontend updates appear immediately and I don't have to mess with triggering an external browser or faffing about. Wonderful tool!
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Been using a text-only browser daily for over thirty years now. In the early to mid 90's I used Lynx. For me, it is the worst of all the text-only browsers I have tried. I would never go back to using it.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  So, what's your favourite text-only browser?
ngneer 2y ago
Still use it in the terminal when debugging cloud applications. KUTGW!
Duanemclemore 2y ago
I'm old enough to remember showing up to a new HS on a college campus in 1996 and our computer lab being on VAX. We had official school pages on gopher (!!!) and the www browser was lynx. To this day I install it on every new machine I get, especially laptops. Just in case I have to find some information on almost zero bandwidth. I don't recall having to use it, maybe once or twice in 25 years max. But it's there if I need it.
_fat_santa 2y ago
Just tried accessing my personal website[1] with Lynx and it works pretty well. Granted Lynx is pretty crumb some compared to other browsers but like other commenters have said, it's a good tool to have in events where you need to access a particular website and have next to no internet connection. EDIT: One thing I am curious about, is there documentation on how to make one's website "lynx friendly". Going through my website it's pretty clean but there are a few areas (like my recipes) that could use adjustment. [1]: https://sunny.gg https://sunny.gg
boothby 2y ago
Due to zoom's resource-intensity and my non-work laptop's dire lack of resources, I find myself using Lynx with some regularity today. I absolutely love it. Thanks, Lynx devs!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Recent discussion: Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238
sireat 2y ago
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.
gloosx 2y ago
A 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....

229 points by jahnu 2y ago

Kudos to the folks keeping it running. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rich_sasha 2y ago

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?

delamon 2y ago
The Wiki has the answer: Unlike most web browsers, Lynx does not support JavaScript, which many websites require to work correctly.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  Well, yes. But what's the browsing experience like then? I appreciate I can just install it and try, but tips for any long time users would be more insightful I think.
eadmund 2y ago
Well-written websites look great it it; poorly-written ones look terrible or are blank pages. That’s the same as with any other text-mode browser. A lot of sites require Javascript to function, even when their actual functionality does not (pro tip: if you use Javascript to display text, show images or create links, you are doing it wrong). That’s a real shame. As a general rule, the best sites work great, and the worst ones don’t work at all. This is not entirely a bad thing! It cna make web browsing less distracting. I often use a text-mode browser as a primary, and fall back to Firefox when using some Javascript-laden monstrosity.
bdeshi 2y ago
elinks is another textmode web browser that supports some javascript. https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/ https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/
mrweasel 2y ago
The problem, for the sites I'm interested in, typically isn't the lack of JavaScript, but how the sites layout. Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article. If you have website, which have actual content (text), it's pretty easy to ensure that it looks good and works in Lynx, with minimal effort.
- wantless 2y ago
  Site layout can definately be an annoyance browsing in text. More accessible sites will offer a Jump to Content link near the top, which is the case with Wikipedia. In Lynx, hitting the ">" to move down a row of links then right arrow (or corresponding vim motion if configured) brings you adjacent to the article TOC and significantly closer to the article text.
- basscomm 2y ago
  > Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article. Wikipedia has a link at the top of the page that is labeled 'jump to content' that skips over all of the menu gunk at the top. Several other sites also do this
anenefan 2y ago
Lynx is still valuable even if one doesn't use it to browse the web. It's been a while but when large sites would every so often alter their link landscape, via pruning or renaming, Lynx was a useful tool when looking for similar pages that may not be displayed by search engines with the given query parameters, (non matching name,) and more often it was Lynx I'd use as it was quick to dump most of the links to search though later on if I needed to rather than deploy wget's spider mode lynx -dump -listonly -nonumbers http://foobar.com/ http://foobar.com/ >foobar.txt
wantless 2y ago
This response was written from Lynx within a tmux session: Hacker News remains a notable bastion of simplicity, usability, and accessibility. Lynx is my primary browswer, but precisely because I desire a degree of separation from the "modern" internet. This requires curation. Many sites simply do not work. But this practice gives me space to reconsider what I actually want from the web and what the web wants from me.

SweetSoftPillow 2y ago

Can we run it in Chrome?

haunter 2y ago
Well apparently you can compile it to wasm so probably yes? https://gist.github.com/Potherca/866dfc72de9bfe0fc5627945446826a6 https://gist.github.com/Potherca/866dfc72de9bfe0fc5627945446...

vogelke 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/ https://lynx.browser.org/

eviks 2y ago
You mean unreadable on mobile due to tiny text?
- galago 2y ago
  Should we blame an old timey basic webpage for its lack of complexity or should we blame a modern browser for not accommodating the web in its most simple form?
  - eviks 2y ago
    We can walk and chew gum? Also, how much complexity do you think is needed to fix this by the webpage?
    - tempodox 2y ago
      It would be up to the browser to render HTML sensibly. Use a browser that can.
      - SkiFire13 2y ago
        There is a specification that says how it should be rendered. I definitely don't want every browser to decide how to render my webpage, that would just make development so much harder and complex.
- im3w1l 2y ago
  Looked fine for me on mobile.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
  I’m sorry to hear that lunch to zoom is hard on your fingers

sylware 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

Lynx was great, but w3m + gpm for mouse input + fb for graphics was a revelation.

atribecalledqst 2y ago

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 2y ago

I use thr shell alias "?" for websearch with lynx. So "$ ? search term"

nbenitezl 2y ago

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.

johnisgood 2y ago
Yeah, it was "links" in my case I believe. Not sure.
- Arubis 2y ago
  That and `elinks` were both viable and slightly more layout-focused.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

mediumsmart 2y ago
I use http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com for surfing the local folders and lynx to retrieve pages. A little bit of sanity in this crazy world.

anthk 2y ago

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 https://neuters.de (news) https://m.xkcd.com https://m.xkcd.com and a external viewer

XzetaU8 2y ago
Or you can use Dillo browser with the gopher plugin https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-gopher https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-gopher
udev4096 2y ago
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 https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
- anthk 2y ago
  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.
  - udev4096 2y ago
    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
    - anthk 2y ago

andai 2y ago

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 :)

gptoperator05 2y ago
[dead]
nasretdinov 2y ago
Yeah mosh works really well in those kinds of scenarios. My provider once had an outage where they dropped 50% of all packets, which rendered most of the internet completely unusable. I was able to connect to my VPS via mosh (it took 6 attempts since it uses SSH for the initial handshake), and then mosh + w3m worked essentially the same as if no packet drops even existed. Feels like magic
solardev 2y ago
These days, I wonder if it'd be better to just sic a LLM API on it and have it stream you the text summary back?
lawrenceyan 2y ago
> 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.

susam 2y ago

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 <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: 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.

TachyonicBytes 2y ago
I have to add https://nullprogram.com 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/ https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/09/01/

miki123211 2y ago

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).

yaky 2y ago
There is browsh, which uses Firefox underneath: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh And looks like Carbonyl uses Chrome: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

seoulbigchris 2y ago

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.

kaiwen1 2y ago

I 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 on land until the habit faded.

anthk 2y ago
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.

kotaKat 2y ago

For a while I was using https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ in MacOS to get Lynx as a 'native' browser. It was a nifty wrapper. Sadly lost to time... and 32-bit only. :(

esotericwarfare 2y ago

You can render JS only websites using chromium headless like this: chromium --headless example.com --disable-gpu --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --dump-dom --virtual-time-budget=10000 --window-size=800,600 | sed "s|<head>|<head><base href=example.com>|g" | lynx -stdin

fouc 2y ago
good idea, firefox headless would be my choice though (I think all chromium-based browsers should be boycotted)
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  Check browsh out then.

486sx33 2y ago

Like most people my age, my first Internet experience at home was with lynx on a Unix shell. We shared credentials for an account at the school board that we scored from a teachers aid. It was sweet to dial into the school board (same numbers all the teachers used!) and surf around in text only lynx.

john-tells-all 2y ago

As a web developer, everything is in the editor. A super-fast way to preview my web page changes is: lynx --dump localhost:8000/mypage.html Put that in a loop. My server or frontend updates appear immediately and I don't have to mess with triggering an external browser or faffing about. Wonderful tool!

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Been using a text-only browser daily for over thirty years now. In the early to mid 90's I used Lynx. For me, it is the worst of all the text-only browsers I have tried. I would never go back to using it.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
So, what's your favourite text-only browser?

ngneer 2y ago

Still use it in the terminal when debugging cloud applications. KUTGW!

Duanemclemore 2y ago

I'm old enough to remember showing up to a new HS on a college campus in 1996 and our computer lab being on VAX. We had official school pages on gopher (!!!) and the www browser was lynx. To this day I install it on every new machine I get, especially laptops. Just in case I have to find some information on almost zero bandwidth. I don't recall having to use it, maybe once or twice in 25 years max. But it's there if I need it.

_fat_santa 2y ago

Just tried accessing my personal website[1] with Lynx and it works pretty well. Granted Lynx is pretty crumb some compared to other browsers but like other commenters have said, it's a good tool to have in events where you need to access a particular website and have next to no internet connection. EDIT: One thing I am curious about, is there documentation on how to make one's website "lynx friendly". Going through my website it's pretty clean but there are a few areas (like my recipes) that could use adjustment. [1]: https://sunny.gg https://sunny.gg

boothby 2y ago

Due to zoom's resource-intensity and my non-work laptop's dire lack of resources, I find myself using Lynx with some regularity today. I absolutely love it. Thanks, Lynx devs!

deleted 2y ago

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ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Recent discussion: Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238

sireat 2y ago

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.

gloosx 2y ago

A 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....