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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

Is Lynx 2.7.1 currently the best and most compatible console-based web browser?

Some notable ones:

There is a recent fork of elinks which includes basic gemini support https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

There is also w3m with inline image support. https://www.howtogeek.com/103574/how-to-browse-from-the-linu... https://github.com/tats/w3m

Using firefox or chromium as under the hood back-end headless (browsh+firefox) would of course be best, though not as lightweight

Thanks for mentioning elinks (http://elinks.or.cz/).

I was about ¾ of the way through that article and thinking "as an academic exercise, sure. otherwise this just looks like 'its been done a thousand times before... but not by me.'" which was leading me to share the page for elinks.

Lynx is quite unique because its layout engine is really optimized for the console. Unfortunately, most websites nowadays don't render well with it.

There is browsh but it's pretty slow compared to Lynx. I'm currently porting Chromium to the terminal with a text and a SIXEL back-end, I'll share it on HN next week (no Classic MacOS support!).

(author) I use 2.7.1 specifically because that's what was used in the original port and there are so many hacks it would not be a trivial undertaking to find all the changes to drag them forward, assuming a later Lynx even builds and runs on classic Mac OS. Current Lynx is more advanced.

Was just curious what would be a good choice to use on a Linux system. Great article, btw.

Hey, thanks! I'd just use straight up current Lynx, or try w3m for an alternative.

My lynx is a bit newer (current macOS + MacPorts):

  $ lynx --version
  Lynx Version 2.8.9rel.1 (08 Jul 2018)
  libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, OpenSSL 3.0.7, ncurses 6.4.20221231

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