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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

It’s good to see terminal-based browsers are still being developed.

I used to use w3m and lynx back in the day, and found them to be very useful at times (such as only having a GPRS signal available - makes browsing on a “full fat” browser impossible). Paired with screen (though I guess mosh would be a good option these days) to enable a resumable session in case the network dropped, of course.

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Note that this isn't a "true" terminal-based browser. It's built on a WebExtension running in Firefox that renders out the DOM as text to a Go-based CLI client. It's not a browser engine running in your terminal, it's more of a VNC over TTY.

Ah, noted.

Must check and see if w3m and lynx have evolved to cope with the modern JavaScript web!

w3m hasn't, thank goodness.

some find that as a perk.

Elinks is the only one close, but last I tried it there were still issues

Terrible suggestion.

From [1]

"On 17 March 2017, OpenBSD removed ELinks from its ports tree, citing concerns with security issues and lack of responsiveness from the developers.[5]"

Last stable is from 2009. Last development release 2012. Elinks is dead. Realize it uses an old version of Spidermonkey (JS). Elinks should not be used in a production environment, period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinks

I don't think there's a single reason to use a text-based browser in a production environment.

I think you're perfectly able to understand what I meant there: anything other than research purpose in an isolated environment e.g. sandbox.

browsing through SSH

Not just browsing (the web) - the idea of an HTML-based application UI can be extended to the text mode instead of getting stuck with the choice between a GUI and a command-line (or a custom curses-based) interface. (Imagine VSCode running in a terminal!)

links, on the other hand, is current. (Works on Windows, too.)

edbrowse has minimal js support thru duktape.

Browsh does some js, and felinks is an actively maintained fork of elinks with some js support as well.

Isn't it more like a TTY mode of VNC more apt? E.g., rendering the X commands as ASCII?

I like Links more than Lynx.

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