Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
112 comments
·March 16, 2025andai
Many moons ago I was on a constrained internet connection -- I set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.
I had like 2KB/s.
This made most of the internet unusable, but it turns out the parts I care about are text. So I just browsed it through a text browser.
This didn't really work either, because it turns out web protocols don't work very well over 2KB/s.
So I browsed the internet by connecting to a $1 VPS (very fast internet!) over Mosh (which is like SSH, but more efficient and resilient). So that way, it would only send the actual bytes of text to me.
I mostly browsed HN and the linked articles at that point.
The browser that rendered HN the best in those days was w3m. I remember it had indentation and even mouse / scrolling support. I tried lynx too and it was good too, but I went with w3m in the end.
I see w3m hasn't been updated in 15 years, but it's probably still better for reading HN, whose UI hasn't changed for longer than that! I will have to give them both a spin :)
nasretdinov
Yeah mosh works really well in those kinds of scenarios. My provider once had an outage where they dropped 50% of all packets, which rendered most of the internet completely unusable. I was able to connect to my VPS via mosh (it took 6 attempts since it uses SSH for the initial handshake), and then mosh + w3m worked essentially the same as if no packet drops even existed. Feels like magic
anthk
For HN there's gopher://hngopher.com and for the main web, links preserves the cascaded formatting for threads. Yes, I used mosh with 2.7 KB/s too, against a pubnix, but I used gopher too for tons of services. Thanks to bitlbee I could talk with my SO and relatives against Telegram and https://brutaldon.org allowed me to read posts at Mastodon.
And, well, gopher://magical.fish it's unbeatable.
lawrenceyan
> set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.
I had no idea this was possible. Can you explain why this works? Sounds fascinating.
anenefan
Basically you are making a network connection via bluetooth. Depending on the OS you drive, there's probably a guide such as [1] to set up bluetooth via the modem adapter to act as an internet connection.
Of course it relies on both devices being able to create and maintain a good bluetooth connection.
It would be nicer if phones could run two wifi networks at the same time, allowing a mix of leach or hotspots but I guess in practical terms it's only one in a thousand type of demand.
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/internet-on-laptop-with-a-bluetooth...
lawrenceyan
Oh I see. So you technically could have placed the laptop where the phone was to get a connection, but it was in an awkward location so placing the phone there instead and setting up a hotspot was better.
solardev
These days, I wonder if it'd be better to just sic a LLM API on it and have it stream you the text summary back?
kapitar
Ah yes. I remember having to do something similar. My connection was via 3G on an old Sony Ericsson K750, which was acting as a Bluetooth modem.
I think I did manage to get about 5k/s by placing it at various points around the room, but it was mostly dropped packets and 1k down.
gptoperator05
[dead]
kaiwen1
I still used Lynx as my default browser while working on ships until 2020. Satellite internet connections at sea were slow and very expensive which made Lynx a good choice. But it turned out that the text-based, distraction-free browsing could be a better experience than the same site in a modern browser. And a few sites still serve text versions, like text.npr.org. I liked Lynx enough that I would still use it back on land until the habit faded.
anthk
You would love gopher with gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org among others such as gopher://gopher.icu
Oh, and reddit: gopher://gopherddit.com
HN: gopher://gopherddit.com
But, as they stated, connecting to a pubic Unix like mosh was and is magic.
esotericwarfare
You can render JS only websites using chromium headless like this:
chromium --headless example.com --disable-gpu --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --dump-dom --virtual-time-budget=10000 --window-size=800,600 | sed "s|<head>|<head><base href=example.com>|g" | lynx -stdin
sylware
Proud user of noscript/basic (x)html browsers here.
Lynx and links (and I wanted to _code_ my own using netsurf libraries).
Restoring noscript/basic (x)html will only happen with hardcore regulation (or "tarif"/"gigantic fines"... same same...).
This is critical for the web, since that makes developing real-life alternative browsers a reasonable task from many pertinent perspectives.
The current technical landscape of the web is a disaster: a cartel of 2.5 absurdely and grotesquely gigantic web engines written in the most complex computer language out there which requires a compiler on the same complexity level... and there are only 2 of them from roughly from the same cartel/mob.
It seems that technical interop of the web with a very simple standard, stable in time and good enough to do the job is a 'competitive' issue of the small vs the big and should be handle by regulating administrations.
Remember, tons of web sites were noscript/basic (x)html compatible and doing a more than enough good job already... without insane technical dependencies...
donatj
Very early in my Linux days in the early 2000s I was bound and determined to learn how to use Lynx as I thought the skill would be a necessity for maintaining servers. Being able to look up issues online and what not.
Little did I realize that 99% of the time I would be SSHed in from a full desktop with a standard browser, and Lynx has just been kind of a fun novelty for me.
susam
It is unfortunate that modern web development has led to websites so complex that they either break entirely or look terrible in text-based browsers like Lynx. Take Mastodon, for example:
$ lynx https://mastodon.social/
[…]
To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript.
Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your
platform.
$ lynx https://wiki.c2.com/
[…]
javascript required to view this site
why
lynx https://danluu.com/ # Mostly okay but some needed spaces missing
lynx https://en.wikipedia.org/ # Okay, but a large wall of links on top
lynx https://irreal.org/blog/ # Renders fine
lynx https://libera.chat/ # Mostly fine
lynx https://news.ycombinator.com/ # Of course!
lynx https://sachachua.com/ # Mostly fine
lynx https://shkspr.mobi/ # Renders really well
lynx https://susam.net/ # Disclosure: This is mine
lynx https://norvig.com/ # A classic!
lynx https://nullprogram.com/ # Also pretty good
While JavaScript has its place, I believe that websites that focus on delivering primarily text content could prioritise working well in TUI browsers. Sometimes testing it with text-based browsers may even show fundamental issues with your HTML. For example, several times, I've seen that multiple navigation links next to each other have no whitespace between them. The links may appear like this:
HomeBlogRSSAboutCodebergMastodon
14 Mar 2025The Lost Art of Dual Booting
15 Mar 2025Some Forgotten Features of Gopher
16 Mar 2025My Favourite DOS Games
crazygringo
Is it really so bad?
Unlike computer interfaces, the web was never text-first. It was graphical from the start. The first browser was in a GUI, not a terminal.
Sites have been hobbled/broken on Lynx since the very beginning. It's neat and can be convenient to have a browser that works in your terminal for simple stuff, but the web was never designed for that. It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break. The burden is really on Lynx to do what it can to support sites as they are, rather than sites to try to build compatibility with Lynx.
It's kind of like, there are programs to "view" a PDF in the terminal, or at least its text content. But PDF authors shouldn't be expected to optimize the order text is presented for those programs. That's not what PDF was ever meant for, even if you can get it work sometimes.
scratcheee
Given the web’s much wider remit than pdf, it has support for accessibility tools and much better non-visual handling than pdf, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair I think. If a website doesn’t handle lynx well, there’s a good chance it doesn’t handle accessibility well either.
ForTheKidz
> It's natural and to be expected that many sites will break.
There is nothing "natural" about software development at all. It was an active choice to hobble the internet as a browser to sell ads via interactive apps.
mongol
No it wasn't. The img element was not added to the standard until HTML 2.0
crazygringo
Images and other media were supported from the start, they just opened in separate windows instead of being inline.
The first browser ran on NeXT, graphically. It did not grow out of the terminal. And the very first publicly formalized definition of HTML in 1993 did already include the img tag:
wolrah
Back in the day my 28.8k modem came bundled with a book on HTML, which is how I learned to make my first personal web site.
Even back then, the book recommended testing your web site in Lynx for two reasons:
1. Web sites are supposed to gracefully degrade when viewed in browsers without support for advanced features.
2. Accessibility matters, and while most of us don't have access to or know how to operate screen readers if we can comfortably view and navigate a web site in Lynx there's a pretty decent chance that it'll be usable with a screen reader.
It's been ~30 years since then and those reasons still apply just as well. For the vast majority of web sites which do not have any need to be interactive webapps there's not really any good reason for it not to be perfectly usable in a text-only browser, and if it's both readable and navigable in a text browser it should also be with a screen reader.
dlcarrier
By the time it caught on, HTML did allow for very graphical web pages, and that's not even considering how popular Flash Player was when the internet had its initial growth spurt. Technically, very early versions of HTML, especially predating CSS, were closer to epub than modern HTML, but there were so few web pages it's not a meaningful argument against your supposition.
I think what's more important is that a significant portion of web pages have no more complex layout than a newspaper or slideshow, so why not make them easy to parse? Not only would it make browsing in Lynx easier, but it would work well with screen readers, which are the only way some people can browse web pages.
LeratoAustini
I think a significant difference is that in the early days, the content was predominantly text, with styling/images/multimedia to embellish the content. But today it feels like a large proportion of websites put the embellishments first, the text content is thin and you often have to hunt it out.
Of course the web has evolved and has uses other than reading/absorbing information (some of them great) and multimedia content is valid, but it does seem to have become harder to find substance in amongst all the style.
When I'm surfing the web it's still usually words that I'm looking for. I think that may be going out of fashion.
prepend
Wasn’t lynx before other graphical browsers? I remember first using the web through a vax terminal and lynx. You could download images but had to launch a viewer.
kevin_thibedeau
Nexus predates Lynx.
philistine
I think you guys are talking across one another. You both are correct to my point of view. OP is correct that allowing websites, by enacting standards that allowed such a thing, to script their rendering was a mistake. You are also correct that the web is visual from the start.
TachyonicBytes
I have to add https://nullprogram.com, just because of the care the author took to have it work better in lynx[1]:
Just in case you haven’t tried it, the blog also works really well with terminal-based browsers, such as Lynx and ELinks. Go ahead and give it a shot. The header that normally appears at the top of the page is actually at the bottom of the HTML document structure. It’s out of the way for browsers that ignore CSS.
ta1243
And of course https://news.ycombinator.com/
Which works perfectly, including navigation (next/prev/parent). The perfect way to use javascript to enhance a site (collapsing threads etc) but not require it.
HN is hosted on a single machine in a colo somewhere (with a backup elsewhere), yet has far more value than the majority of sites 100 times as complex.
monsieurbanana
Because HN value is the value of the comments, and those are a scarce resource. Making a great website (for whatever is your definition of great) doesn't guarantee that it will become valuable.
All this to say, HN shouldn't an example to blindly follow.
johnea
I agree with your javascript complaints, and I use a graphical browser.
I do prefer to surf with js disabled, and in most cases it actually works pretty well.
But the lack of non-js mastedon has pretty much stopped me from reading posts on the system. I can surf github, and this site, with no js, but mastedon is a no go.
The conversion of the internet into a scam ad distribution system is the primary culprit leading to the massive proliferation of js, along with the use of overly complex "frameworks" that could often be static html, I don't know what mastedon's excuse is...
zimpenfish
Brutaldon[0] is a Mastodon UI that (allegedly) works with Lynx. Which is something.
cedilla
> The number of text-based web users may be shrinking
I wouldn't be surprised if it's growing in absolute numbers, in relative numbers it stays at essentially 0% where it always was.
kragen
When I started using the WWW in 01992 the majority of Web users were probably using text-based browsers, and specifically Lynx, because that was what the University of Kansas was using for its campuswide information service (CWIS). Mosaic didn't exist yet, and most people accessing the internet were using either dumb terminals like I was (typically in my case a VT-100 or CIT-101 clone of it) or dialup terminal emulators like Procomm+.
anthk
For mastodon, https://brutadon.org works with the 'old login form'.
For the c2wiki, there are clones of it which work with plain text, but I can't remember the alternative domain. You can DDG/GG it, tho.
johnisgood
I made an e-commerce platform that has zero JavaScript. It is PHP only. Additionally, cgit uses JavaScript for updating idle time, but you do not need it, just refresh the page.
But yeah, I wish people were more hesitant over-using JavaScript.
febeling
I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/
nabla9
Missing one line to look good in mobile.
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">zimpenfish
Added. Makes the text better but now the screenshot is too large. Bloody HTML.
nabla9
I prefer to add
<style>
img, video { max-width:100%;}
</style>tsukikage
What does that do, and why is it not the default?
nabla9
Many mobile devices render pages in a virtual window aka viewport, which is wider than the screen, and then shrink the rendered result down so it can all be seen at once.
Mobile browsers can stop doing that any time they want. They do it because pages not optimized for mobile and break often in mobile.
This 'shit-sifting' phenomenon in common in open protocols with lots of software and inertia.
1. Bad shit in the other end breaks this end.
2. Fix it with hack in this end.
3. Good shit in the other end is now bad shit with the fix.
4. Add workaround to make good shit good again.
(Microsoft Internet Explorer was born after Bill Gates did seance and Satan taught him to use this phenomenon to corrupt the internet.)
Paianni
That landing page seems unmaintained, I think this is the main home page: https://lynx.invisible-island.net/
zimpenfish
> That landing page seems unmaintained.
I maintained it for a while, then delegated the DNS to someone else, but they didn't maintain it either, swapped it back. ~I'll update it when I get a chance.~
edit: Updated with the correct version and some small HTML tweaks
kragen
This says:
> Access Denied - Sucuri Website Firewall
...
> Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.
For that reason I don't think it's a good page to recommend.
andai
The font in the screenshot is Cosmic Sans [sic],
https://github.com/gregkh/cosmic-sans-neue
which was later renamed Fantasque due to hate mail.
zimpenfish
> The font in the screenshot is Cosmic Sans
Probably Fantasque because I've (to the best of my memory) never installed Cosmic Sans (and I made the screenshot, obvs.) but I do occasionally use Fantasque for terminals.
But since the screenshot needs updating, I'm open to suggestions for what font to use this time.
zimpenfish
Opted for Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono, Bold, at 20pt.
greggsy
Do you mean the naming similarity to Comic Sans?
piker
Unreadable on a phone without zooming and panning. A little CSS wouldn’t be a bad thing here.
brainwad
Perfectly readable in Firefox Mobile. Chrome too. What mobile browser are you using?
metalman
also works with android "Stoutner privacy browser" with java scripts, cookies, DOM, turned OFF went strait to the resources page, where there are versions for a lot of different OS's nothing for android, but not realy expecting to find that, anyway.
eviks
You mean unreadable on mobile due to tiny text?
galago
Should we blame an old timey basic webpage for its lack of complexity or should we blame a modern browser for not accommodating the web in its most simple form?
eviks
We can walk and chew gum? Also, how much complexity do you think is needed to fix this by the webpage?
bdw5204
It's perfectly readable on Brave for Android. The text even wraps to the screen size so you don't have to scroll.
Which phone browser renders it in an unreadable manner?
eviks
Any phone browser that rendered the page before they added a simple fix
hsbauauvhabzb
I’m sorry to hear that lunch to zoom is hard on your fingers
im3w1l
Looked fine for me on mobile.
vogelke
I use it for two things:
* saving webpages as text with the links nicely organized at the bottom, and
* calling it from mutt (MUA) to display HTML parts of mail messages.
It works great and it's consistent.
atribecalledqst
Years ago (like 2013), I had an actual use case for lynx, which was that I was staying at a hotel long-term and I couldn't access the Wi-Fi landing page from my browser for some reason. But I could hit it from lynx, so I'd just log in from there every day.
Never had to do that since, but it sure saved my ass back then...
Duanemclemore
I'm old enough to remember showing up to a new HS on a college campus in 1996 and our computer lab being on VAX.
We had official school pages on gopher (!!!) and the www browser was lynx.
To this day I install it on every new machine I get, especially laptops. Just in case I have to find some information on almost zero bandwidth. I don't recall having to use it, maybe once or twice in 25 years max.
But it's there if I need it.
noufalibrahim
My first browser. There was another one called links which would display graphics inside the terminal.
mediumsmart
I use http://links.twibright.com for surfing the local folders and lynx to retrieve pages. A little bit of sanity in this crazy world.
nbenitezl
Oh, this brings back memories of my first steps with Gentoo linux, when I failed at setting up the display (XFree86 back then) or configure it properly, I remember browsing Gentoo wiki pages with Lynx to bring it back.
johnisgood
Yeah, it was "links" in my case I believe. Not sure.
Arubis
That and `elinks` were both viable and slightly more layout-focused.
Kudos to the folks keeping it running.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)