[Blink]

I'm writing this from the Lynx web-browser.
Lynx is the oldest web-browser that is still in general use and under active development. Just like any other web-browser, it allows you to view webpages.
The difference between Lynx and other browsers is that Lynx it text-based. That is... You use it from a (virtual) terminal and can view normal websites.

It's great if X breaks or you just don't feel like firing up the big GUI programs.


However, there's more than one text-based browser... w3m is another popular one (http://w3m.sourceforge.net)... The unique part about w3m is that it has the ability to display images in xterm (chances are, if you are viewing this from a *nix computer with X installed, yoyu have xterm installed already). The problem is... You can't login to SL from it.

Another option is eLinks. Don't even try to use it, it's all nice and uses curses for dialogs, but it's slower than any other browser.


There's a few other lesser-known ones, but those are all very similar to Lynx, and probably developed less actively.

Lynx is great for doing research and deciding what packages to install when you don't have a GUI up yet. It's also great when you always have 150+ tabs open at a time in your main browser, so you don't wanna start it up. (me)


It also allows you to use the standard shell shortcuts like CTRL+A to move to the start of a line.

Lynx also has some security advantages. Many images are used to track people by seeing what IP the image GET request came from. These can be as small as a single pixel, and are often embedded in emails.
Since Lynx cannot render images, it doesn't request them, so these images don't affect you. Is supports SSL, but does not support JS [Citation needed] [Why am I writing like Wikipedia?].
When a site tries to give you a cookie (I want a cookie!), then it gives you options to accept once, always accept, or decline.

Lynx also appareantly supports Braille and text-to-speech.

Lynx can run external progams to view video or images if so desired.

Lynx has a total of 142 command line options, and 233 options for the config file.

I'll also sometimes use it at school when the internet is slow, as it doesn't load any images, JS, or othur non-text content.

[Pikami]

I've tried lynx in the past
I would not use it because most sites are being targeted to major browsers and I wouldn't get the best experience.
One thing is for sure: if X breaks, it can come in handy.

[Blink]

I've tried lynx in the past
I would not use it because most sites are being targeted to major browsers and I wouldn't get the best experience.
One thing is for sure: if X breaks, it can come in handy.

I find it to work pretty well with most sites. It works perefectly with SL, and it works with StackExchange and most sites that I've used.

It's also more simple than other text-based browsers such as w3m.

[zorrophreak]

I have actually used SL on Lynx, and while it was rough to use, it wasn't impossible and when my PC was broken and I was using an RPi with a 1GB SD Card, it certainly came in handy. As for the others, I recall using w3m a long time ago, but I couldn't comment on it now. There was one I used once which ran really well. It might've been Netrik but I'm not sure.

[Blink]

Now that I'm on a graphical browser... I just realized that I wrote way more than I intended.