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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Cool, ok, and certainly a surprising hack, but what's with the gushing comments? Who wants to run Chrome in a terminal? Almost nobody, because there are dedicated, lean alternatives for browsing since the start of the web, and almost nobody uses them.

Am I missing something?

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Are you teasing us on purpose by not suggesting some well known lean alternatives? lynx comes to mind, doesn't show images, does work ok. But what are you thinking about?

Alas, in 2023 most of the modern web just won’t work with Lynx. Or w3m. Or Elinks. Or it will work but in a way that makes you suffer and miss on functionality you might need.

Just a consequence of turning a markup language into an OS.

But what's the point of using a terminal to render a website lynx and friends can't handle, when the browser is but a click away? I can imagine a scenario like this: you must use a website that can only be reached from within a certain network, and you can ssh in, but there's no X11 tunnel, and the website really requires rendering animated SVGs and Javascript. That would be a lousy design, but it might happen. But how often do you encounter that?

Personally, I'm pretty sick of the bloated, image heavy, ad infested nature of the modern web. Terminal browsers promise a lighter experience focused on content rather than style.

This one renders the ads in your terminal just fine.

I would certainly run this over something like lynx. In fact, my reaction was "oh, this is what I'm looking for when I reach for lynx".

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