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Comment by cassepipe | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a text only browser that would render the web similarly to Firefox reading mode. All the lynx, links, elinks are not very user friendly and a bit ugly alas. I hear some of them have a Vim mode for navigation but I did not manage to use it reliably either.

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Yes, they are ugly because they don't understand the modern web.

Firefox reading mode is pretty because it understands the modern web, and is making opinionated choices about what to display to you.

They are different design goals.

It's not read-mode-level, but I've always liked Dillo (https://www.dillo.org/) for its sheer speed with acceptable design. It's only rendering HTML with CSS, and that is enough for a vast majority of cases.

I really like Dillo, it's my main browser on an old computer I still use. It feels very fast. However, it has some issues with SSL. Can you click trough duckduckgo results, for instance?

I also miss a slightly more useable interface for bookmarks. And touch compatibility (to use it on my PinePhone).

I really like the js-free experience. I've also used elinks in the past, zimbra works quite well with it, and pressing F4 to edit my emails in vim is a breeze :)

Compile dillo from mercurial (hg clone hg.dillo.org/dillo dillo, cd dillo, ./configure --enable-ipv6 --enable-ssl, make, sudo make install) and then edit ~/.dillo/dillorc so it looks like:

        DEFAULT DENY
        .domain.foo ACCEPT
        .domain.foo ACCEPT_SESSION

You may also want to try out NetSurf, it is another lightweight browser but i think it has better support for HTML+CSS than Dillo.

A dozen or so years ago, w3m used to be cream of the crop (as far as JS support went, at least). What happened to it?

Yeah I remember w3m being really good. Looking at the sourceforge page, it seems like development stopped in 2012.

It's still doing good: https://github.com/tats/w3m

I am a very happy using w3m every day. Just occasionally there is a need to use a graphical browser.

There is no JS support though. Don't think there ever was.

w3m supported tables and frames, but I'm pretty sure it never supported JS out of the box. There was an experimental w3m-js extension, but I don't think it ever saw much development: the most recent snapshot of that page [1] is from ~2010, and it links to patches from 2003.

Elinks supposedly had it, but you have to compile it in yourself and I'm not sure how it fares these days. Edbrowse has decent support for it, but its rendering is not meant for sighted people and rudimentary (e.g., no color, it doesn't bother with aligning table cells).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100504081232/http://abe.nwr.jp...

Me too. I thought it could render all the elements, since it knows their size and layout, but just not retrieve the actual data inside unless clicked or enabled. A few rules would probably suffice to keep text content and necessary interactive items visible.

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