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Comment by kaiwen1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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If 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).

I'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.).

Old.reddit.com is fine until you follow someone’s link on reddit and it takes you back to the new reddit. Argh.

There are extensions (at least for Firefox, but I think Chrome has those too) to always redirect to old reddit.

You can also log in and set your preference to old reddit

That does not work in my experience.

You know what is better than extensions: Old Reddit Please

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please

Works great in Violentmonkey/Greasemonkey.

I use this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

I can't figure out what the Reddit dev team's plan is. Their front-end is way worse now than it was five years ago - much slower, and nags you to install their app on mobile.

> I can't figure out what the Reddit...'s plan is ... and nags you to install their app on mobile.

That part the cynic in me sees as obvious: easier tracking with the perms that most apps require, so they can command a higher price for any ad impressions.

I think the same is true for a great many apps that could be replaced by a well constructed site or, if offline use is needed, a PWA (the argument of supporting old devices is moot: if your phone is too old to run a well written PWA reasonably then it probably isn't new enough to be well-supported by the related native app either).

Well, we could always seem if somebody does a revival of the text-based Reddit Terminal Viewer: https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv

Can you name some sites you use? I would use it more, for lack of some more of those sites that degrade gracefully.

Google was lynx friendly for a long time but that seemed to have stopped this year :(. RIP Google

Any 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.

Funnily enough, HN actually works reasonably well in lynx.

As 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:// always.

Metafilter always worked wonderfully, but it's been a while since I've tried it.

Not sure that counts as major.

In a way, it’s improved over the past 2 decades because nobody uses Frames anymore.

I don't use Lynx much, but Wikipedia, HN, Everything2 work fairly well.

Thanks for reminding me about Everything2. I used to spend so much time on that site, but somewhat forgot about it over the years.

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.

When 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

Curious: How does Opera Mini fare in comparison?

During 2000s, Opera Mini created a great web browsing experience over 56k dial-ups.

I 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.

Does 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.

Ha - 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.

Have you tried w3m?

Yeah, w3m is now my favorite terminal browser.

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