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Does anyone still use the Lynx text-only web browser? It would seem useful for certain classes of low-end mobile devices, especially if one is billed per KB of data transfer.

18 Answers 18

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three uses:

  1. testing web pages for logical structure for search engines

  2. testing web pages for accessibility to screenreaders (e.g. for visually impaired users)

  3. fast, safe access to text-based web sites.

2
  • I would add: 4. Extract text contents from HTML.
    – mouviciel
    Oct 6, 2009 at 8:10
  • 1
    I would add: 5. Download files on text-only systems (many servers don't need/have GUIs), which is not the same as #3 above because these files are sometimes on web sites that were not designed with text-only web browsers in mind Feb 18, 2011 at 7:27
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I use it sometimes when I have only a terminal connection and no X, which admittedly is rarely the case nowadays.

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  • When doing installs of systems like FreeBSD and Arch, where the documentation is a necessity, console browsers are very useful.
    – new123456
    Jul 14, 2012 at 23:06
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I just used it for fun. There are many better solutions for mobile phones. Besides if I'm getting charged by the KB then I'm changing phone plans.

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If they do, I pity them. The web has almost always been a graphical medium since Mosaic was created in 1993, so any attempt to squeeze it into a text-only terminal is bound to have serious drawbacks.

The only reason I could see for using it is if you're using it over an SSH session and the server (or your client) doesn't support X forwarding through SSH. But that's the only reason.

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  • 8
    It's only been graphical since Mosaic. Jul 20, 2009 at 0:40
  • 6
    Text is sufficient for pulling wikipedia articles for instance.
    – hasen
    Jul 20, 2009 at 2:21
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I use it a few times a week. I prefer to use Pine for my (work) email client and have lynx configured for browsing links in the email... especially if it is a questionable site.

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I stopped using lynx when I found links2, mostly because it handled tables and frames better and even a tad of javascript.

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I have IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Lynx available on my dev machine.

I use Firefox as my default and the others for testing purposes. Sometimes it's fun to browse around on Lynx for nostalgia.

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I've only ever used such browsers (w3m usually) via SSH, to quickly test a site is working from a remote machine.

The web has never really suited command line browsers, if you're concerned about bandwidth usage, most browsers are very configurable - disable image loading, disable Flash and Java, disable Javascript. I'm not sure if you can disable the retrieval of external CSS and Javascript files, but I'm sure this is possible too.

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Being a savvy developer, I use PHP to perform lots of system operations (check system status, monitor logs, execute other text mode commands, etc). Lynx lets me develop a sophisticated text based interface for this and many other things, including aggregating content, in two of the languages I already know and allows me to access from a terminal. Additionally, I can access the same pages in a GUI web browser as well. use lynx several times a week. Sometimes I'm devoting the 50+megs firefox would take of my physical ram (i run with no swap) on a low end system and across an already taxed wifi network. Here, lynx is great. Since someone else mentioned something called links2, i'm open to an upgrade and am going to try it.

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i use lynx a lot. the benefit of text only browsing helped me to develop various shell scripts to extract the info i need from some webpages

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I use lynx from time to time. I've always got PuTTY sshed into a NetBSD box. It's useful if the network is a bit fried or I want to get some information from a marketing-heavy site and I'm at home on the PAYG 3G card.

Opera 10 may be a better solution for some low-bandwidth requirements, but the last time I tried it there was trouble with using http...

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I've tested with it a few times, but for cases where I need to download something from the command line and wget isn't an option, elinks supports far more markup (= more sites) so I tend to use it instead.

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I occasionally use elinks, another text browser.

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Since my home server is console-only, I use lynx/links whenever I have problems with the network routing between WAN (ADSL) and LAN (surprisingly often). Consists mostly of googling and reading Gentoo Wiki.

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I use w3m from time to time, mainly for downloading files to servers from sites that require cookies. w3m can even display images if you run it with a valid X display or on a Linux framebuffer console.

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I'm using lynx when I am connecting in some computer without X support. Lynx was my first web browser, when I was learning how to navigate...

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I use it when I'm on a slow link and need to download a file from some big bloated website.

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I use links2 both text and graphical on my HP Jornada (old pocket PC kind of a thing) and it's my most comfortable browser for that device. Runs fast on 200mhz and shows just enough to find help on some scripting or linux stuff. Works great with gmail mobile view.

I just want copy-paste to work and I call it my favourite :P

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  • copy-paste works with screen. Ctrl+A [ then select and enter, Ctrl+A ] pastes
    – naugtur
    Aug 11, 2010 at 13:33

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