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Comment by gcthomas | Hacker News Reader

Lagrange is the best of the Gemini clients right now, if you are looking for a GUI app. It launches in a fraction of a second, which is blissful compared to launching a full-fat web browser, and you get the lean, clean pages that Gemini offers, with no need for extensions and adblockers, javascript or fancy frame-based pages.. Although Lagrange does handle multimedia well, it is focussed on making plain unicode text look beautiful.

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Elaho [1] is a really nice Gemini browser for iOS. It’s quite enjoyable to fire it up once in a while and go down that particular rabbit hole.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/elaho/id1514950389

Diohsc is the other contender for best client, but for a new user, Lagrange is best.

I prefer Amfora as a TUI client:

https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora#amfora

But I'll give Diohsc a go!

I used amfora for quite a while before I found Lagrange and Diohsc. It is a very good client, also probably the easiest to use TUI client for starting out.

Diohsc takes a little getting used to, but once you start using marks and the queue, it becomes very pleasant.

There’s Elpher if you’re on Emacs. It supports both gopher and gemini.

> with no need for extensions and adblockers, javascript or fancy frame-based pages

Doesn’t Gemini expose your IP address? Would it make sense to bundle TOR with the app?

> Doesn’t Gemini expose your IP address?

The server does receive it, just like with standard HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc.

Gemini requires SNI. Major design flaw, IMO. It should be optional. AFAIK there are no gemini sites that support TLS1.3 with ESNI/ECH.^1 That means every hostname gets sent in plaintext over the wire. No exceptions. (Not every site owner is going to do virtual hosting, yet every client request must send SNI anyway. That is dumb.)

Tracking a user's complete browsing history would seem quite easy unless sites add padding to disguise file sizes.

At least with HTTP, most Cloudlfare-hosted sites will support ESNI. Plus there are some other workarounds to avoid SNI on other sites. Better than nothing.

1. Putting an ECH-enabled proxy in front of gemini servers may be one solution. https://defo.ie

Gemini is not finalized yet, but by the time it is it will most probably standardize 1.3

From solderpunk, the founder: "When I started Gemini I dearly wanted to specify that TLS 1.3 be the minimum allowed version of TLS."

https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2021/007539.html

> AFAIK there are no gemini sites that support TLS1.3 with ESNI/ECH

gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi : 86 % of the capsules use TLS 1.3, 14 % use TLS 1.2.

Not sure about ESNI/ECH stats but TLS 1.3 is pretty widely used.

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