Slashdot Mirror

well, i don't know about tabs... but the fastest browsers on earth are:

lynx
links
dillo

if you don't mind not seeing the pretty pictures, that is.

So are you talking about lynx or links ?

"is there a Lynx for Win32??"

Yes there is! Lynx

But you've still checked 7 more browser types than most of the web doodes I've worked with, good stuff.

That idiot doesn't know that besides Lynx, there is also Links.

Parent is not offtopic !

...Lynx has that oh-so-scary Y and X in there. It looks very L33t and hacker-friendly. Now, if that poor guy had only used Links instead, this whole mess wouldn't have happened. There's nothing scary about an I and a K is there? Though I guess you could use them to say Mikrosoft. That's kinda creepy I suppose.

...we could start a fund raising project to run a full-page ad for Lynx?

QoS (or Quality-of-service) is traffic shaper replacement for Internet Service Providers (ISP). Dump your vintage hard-wired routers/shapers (C|sco, etc.) in favour of powerful open source and free solution !

Prometheus QoS generates multiple nested HTB tc classes with various rate and ceil values, and implements optional daily traffic quotas and data transfer statistics (as HTML). It is compatible with NAT, both asymetrical and symetrical, yet still provides good two-way shaping and prioritizing, both upload and download.

Prometheus QoS was written in C

ph33r the power of Arachne, bioatch!

All browsers?

I think not!

-Bill
(And I didn't even mention telnet'ing to port 80!)

What about Lynx?

Well, http://lynx.browser.org/ is not affected.

Ummm... My Win machine is running SP4. Oh, you mean XP SP2. Not on my machines, man... The highest I'll go on my personal machines is 2k. Wow, thanks for that little tidbit. Now we all know that xp is t3h sux0rz. also, don't forget lynx, links, and Mosaic

There's always a backup browser to avoid legal hassels in being forced to watch advertisements on the web -> Lynx. Now if only they had a Lynx TV. I've always wanted to watch the Simpsons in ascii art.

...Lynx and be done with it. :)

http://lynx.browser.org/

What's the point of posting this as news...? There's so much prior art (Lynx) that this patent will be thrown away as soon as someone challenges it.

The story should be called: USPTO stuffs up again.

NTSH, MA

Internet Explorer?

...text browsers!

It may not be the #1 choice for your kids, but using it to just read stuff like news, it really saves your time, and the information is displayed surprisingly well.

I don't think Apple would use Lynx

Lynx already is a text based browser.

http://lynx.browser.org/

Let's start with the shell--zsh is by far the best one I've used. It has everything.

Moving on, Links (web browser) and Naim (AIM/ICQ/IRC client) rock. The only issue with the former is that Links doesn't support cookies, so I have Lynx in case I want to post on /. or something.

I don't have a console mail client on my machine--I have other methods of getting my email. For accessing my email account with my uni, I ssh into my uni's shell account and use pine from there or I use Links to access the Squirrelmail setup on my web server (over HTTPS, of course). To access my fastmail.fm account, I just use Links to access their web interface (they support both web and IMAP access for free).

For downloading stuff, I use giFTcurs, the btdownloadcurses.py BitTorrent client, and the venerable wget, depending on what I'm looking for and where I'm downloading from.

And, for the part that will generate the most flamage, my text editor of choice: Joe! Its interface is just as simple as nano, but with more features, such as find/replace and decent copy/paste, using text selection. On a related note, I use most as my pager--coloured man pages are good.

And, finally, who could forget NetHack?

Hmm...now I have an urge to find out how to make live CDs, so I can make a ``CLI survival kit'' live CD. Well, maybe not, as I'm too bloody lazy, but it's an idea...

1. Dev Todo is a wonderful outliner and task manager. Today I ported it to win32 using mingw to use at work (it pisses me off that windows dropped ANSI color support in their crappy CMD! I knew it was bad, but I still use it more than msys or cygwin because it is quicker on my slow box). Dev Todo stores everything in beautiful XML. I intend to make a filter for XSLT for my biweekly progress reports. My boss wants me to list things I've gotten done & what I plan to do & this great app can store all of that.
2. Pine-I don't care if RMS doesn't consider it free. It is the best IMAP client. I do like Mulberry as well, though.
3. GNU Screen-I mostly just detach/reattach. I'd like to learn to use it more.
4. VIM-My editor. Again, need to learn it better.
5. Lynx on windows and ELinks on Linux for browsing.
6. I have aliased "fuck" to use cowsay to tell me to calm down. Great stress relief.
7. GPG
8. LaTeX. I hesitated to include this, but I use it on both linux and windows & it is technically interactive. I have started using it more than standard word processors (WordPerfect>OpenOffice>MS Word) and I want to use it instead of impress/powerpoint/whatever.
9. OpenSSH because my box is so much better than the one I use at work
10. NcFTP best ftp client I found, though I have been having much less need to use it.

For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).

CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.

For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.

I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.

When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.

For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)

-- Chris

Hey - who you calling a Luddite? :-)

This might be a troll, but I'll bite.

Don't like GNOME? Use windowmaker. If that's still too fat for you, use oroborus. Still too big? Try setting your window manager to "twm".

Don't like OpenOffice? MS Office isn't much better...maybe you'd better stick to HTML and CSS with Bluefish. Or maybe vim or Emacs.

FireFox still too slow? As long as you're dropping features by moving away, try w3m or lynx...two very capable text-based browsers.

Don't have a 3D accelerator? Play software-rendered Quake. Or (using that same project) use the SDL's aalib target.

And here and here and here. :)

As a matter of a fact i run Dillo AND Opera, I even run Links on the console (cheap routers maintance) and on the X.
How does THAT look for you ? This IS a small footprint browser, no bloat, no dependency lists longer than my penis.

Hell, I used to run ARACHNE on my DOS thin client back in the days. Now it looks like an abandoned project :(.

Don't you mean Lynx???

The only drawback is that those sneaky bastards at google dot com have come up with a way around Lynx's state-of-the-art ad-blocking systems by using text ads, and everyone's following suit (cough /. cough).

This reminds me, am I the only one out there who wishes DNS were never created? Not to mention the mouse?

You seem to have posted a link to Lynx, and not Links.

http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/

I think you'll find that talentless unfunny people can make poorly designed and impossible to navigate websites using plain HTML. That's part of what makes them talentless and unfunny.

To damn a Tool because some people use it ineptly is like banning pencils because the guy across the street draws bad stick figure cartoons.

I would imagine you've never used flash in a developers capacity, or indeed have any comprehension the the world wide web is alot of things to a hell of a lot of people, and suprisingly they might have different needs to you.

As for "tip of an iceberg of security issues" please! An explosion of pop-ups is hardly a security issue (annoying as hell, but not a security problem) and guess what? The abilty to open a new window is a useful tool for developers, that's why it's implemented in a whole bunch of languages.

As for other security issues, flash is a hell of a lot more secure than java for example. Or would you have us all using lynx?

That's the thing with useful tools they can be used for lots of purposes some good some bad. And as web tools go flash is one of the best and most widely supported out there.

I say give them a DOS machine (like a 386) and a high-speed connection that only connects to playboy.com. Just make sure the only browser they have access to is LYNX.

Use Lynx or OffByOne - problem solved.

Lynx is a text-only web browser.

Off By One is a script-free web browser.

Both browsers are immune to popups--hence no need for a popup blocker for the two leading browsers or 'New Online Ad Technology To Bypass Popup Blockers'.

One more Free Pop-up and Ad Blocker :
- Lynx

(I suppose you tell your potential audience to access your site via a Gopher gateway. But is it worth the hassle?)

I also have some issues with the gopher protocol as such. You can't just write a page and stick it on your server. You have to follow a lot of strange little rules for integrating it into the menu structure. These complications have a lot to do with gopher's lack of acceptance,

They're also a big reason web browser support is so poor. The only browser that fully supports the protocol is Lynx. Mozilla/Netscape has a half-assed implementation they inherited from Mosaic, which they never seem to have updated. IE used to have the same code, but has since stripped it out. Opera claims to support gopher if you configure it to use a proxy server-- a concept I don't quite understand and lack any inclination to test.

Should browser vendors support Gopher (better)? Perhaps. Put let's do some prioritizing here. There are a lot of things we need to get browser vendors to do. Better support for W3C specs has to be a major focus Support for legacy protocols that a few enthusiasts won't give up on just isn't worth anybody's energy.

Using lynx, links or dillo will give you a similar browsing experience on your main PC.

Using mozilla with images blocked from images.slashdot.org will probably have the same effect aswell.

Evil. Evil, I say!

This claimer: Having MSIE bundled with Windows poses no problem for me, I see it as they include Notepad instead of Word and Calculator instead of Excel. So why not let them include Internet Explorer instead of a real browser? However, I dislike sites that require it. It's like mailing around text files that need Notepad to read... Rude.

links and lynx are two different browsers.

I could easily imagine a productive environment based around GNU screen and a terminal-based editor, mail client, news client, and IM client. Throw in something like w3m, and other for images, its good.

Yup, that's pretty close to the way I've worked for most of the last year or two. For me it's screen, of course, along with:

• editor - vim,
• mail client - mutt,
• news client - tin,
• web client(s) - a combination of w3m, lynx, and wget for most downloading tasks,
• spreadsheet - sc, which is surprisingly useful,
• P2P client - mutella, though I think there are console options for other protocols,
• IM/IRC client - irssi along with the fantastic bitlbee (and if you haven't heard of bitlbee before, take a look).

...and then I use good 'ol ratpoison for my window manager in X for the occasions that I need graphics (ie. some web browsing, viewing PDFs, playing graphical games).

Strike that. In most cases, multi-tasking can be very counterproductive. Shell escapes and $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE is good enough.

It varies :-), though I agree generally speaking. I'm using KDE3.2beta at the moment for a bit of a change, though most of the action is still inside my screen(1) terminal(s). You do tend to (or at least I tend to) find yourself more productive when you don't have stray graphical bits and pieces around the place to distract you.

Of course if you need the GUI for your normal working environment (ie. you're developing a GUI app), then, well there's not much you can do but live with it. :)

And for those of us too cheap to upgrade our Timex Sinclairs to something more powerful like a Commodore 64, Lynx will have to do.

Parenthetically, the MTA you may be using when running Pine just might be a Microsoft mail server... so beware.

Links: Pine, Elm, Postfix, qmail. Might as well throw Lynx (web) and BitchX (irc) out there for you oldschool turbo C shell users. Home this gets me some karma :)

Glad there are some people out there not using GUIs for simple purposes like these. I hate the mouse.

Unicast, the company responsible, says the ads will play regardless of pop-up blocking.

Not in my browser they won't

More seriously though, it's bad enough that webpage makers seem to disrespect the HTML standard enough to make life for the blind on the web painful, but it seems that this intersticial video ad thing will just flatly deny them access to the pages behind.

Not to mention the legions of internet users who'll be forced to swallow advertising bull in English for products they don't have (and/or don't want) access to in their own countries.

Where can I get a job blasting helpless animals like that?

A redesign of Slashdot is way overdue, IMO. I like the prototype suggested, but have a quibble regarding lo-fi web clients.

When I load the current design in the Links text browser, the page renders with several secreens of page decoration (navigation links, etc) before the actual page content is reached -- specifically, the articles begin on page six when using a 90 column terminal window. The current design, on the other hand, is displayed by Links roughly the way it would appear in a graphical browser, with a top row of links, a column of links on the left hand side, and the bulk of the page taking 80% or so of the right side of the page -- the interesting stuff begins right on the first screen, just like graphical browsers. (The Lynx text browser behaves similarly, but doeesn't do as well with either version of the page.)

I'm not up on contemporary CSS/XHTML design techniques, but it seems to me that a good CSS design effectively divorces the rendered page from the arrangement of elements of the page in the HTML source itself. In other words, it seems like the HTML could be generated in such a way that the first portion of the <body> part of the page has minimal headers & navigation, followed immediately by the "meat" of the page -- the articles & comments on Slashdot, similar content on other sites -- and then the core content can be followed by all the page decoration stuff. This way, a modern browser will still arrange everything on the page in the proper way, but a low end browser like Links would be able to put the most relevant material first.

Alternatively, Links could just be patched to do minimal CSS layout, but that doesn't get around the issue of how to design the HTML itself -- it just patches it for a particular low end web client.)

First of all, I think mouse gestures are wanky and stupid. Gamers, maybe, find them easy because they're used to gesturing crap with their mice. Mine sits and lights up my table more than anything else.

People constantly forget that in order to reach the largest audience possible for your site, you have to make it compatible with the largest audience out there. Far too many sites, attempting to be universally-accessible, have opted to include features that older browsers don't render correctly, can't disable, or generally make it impossible to navigate.

PEOPLE -- If I can't get to your site or can't read it properly using whatever I'm using, I won't be back.

My patience for tricked-out websites that require 99 different plugins to view is zero. My patience for websites that don't render nicely in Lynx or Links is higher, but still not absolute Side Note: I'd like to wring OSDN's neck for making FM and other sites damned near impossible to navigate in text because of their damned OSDN menus. My personal site is built in POH (Plain Old HTML) because it is most universal...I don't care who you are or what you run, you can see it.

First, JavaScript works on a Russian roulette basis...most of the time you'll get an empty chamber, sometimes it'll blow you up. The consistency in implementation leaves something to be desired, especially with more complicated scripts. Secondly, JS is a limiting technology -- if your browser doesn't do it or doesn't do it the way it was meant to do, it'll limit your audience.

If you're ok with the idea of having people not come to your site, fine. There's a lot of sites out there that wouldn't make sense to dumb them down too much (high media sites, etc. come to mind). But if you want a universal audience -- K.I.S.S. Even the trailers section of Apple's website renders nicely under Links, regardless of the fact that they don't have a text-only Quicktime plugin. :)

I agree.

A lot of the bashing is legitimate annoyance at the Truly Evil practice of the "flash intro" to sites, and at putting content in Flash that would be much better handled in HTML.

However, for the things it is better at, Flash isn't just better than HTML, it's better than anything else that's widely accepted. Of course there are things Java can do that Flash can't, but my own experience has been that few of those things add value to average users, while the bugginess of different Java implementations has always irked me.

Oh wait, now I'm bashing Java. Sorry.

Anyway, the sites that use Flash well are really amazing, and you can pack more interesting rich media into 10K of tightly-written Flash/Actionsript than into just about anything else.

For anyone interested in checking out the Flash world, I highly recommend Flashkit, a community site with very good forums and howtos.

(And yes, I do sometimes surf with lynx and links.)

The point of web standards is not--I repeat not--to make your site look the same in all browsers, but that it should be readable or usable in all browsers. A fancy-schmancy table-based layout may look good in most modern browsers, but just try viewing your wonderful page in lynx, or using a screen reader like JAWS and you'll find your fancy table-based layout has been reduced to ashes.

Using web standards, we can design sites that look good and are still usable, all the way back to the first text-based browsers. Did you know that Netscape 1.0 did not even support tables? So, if there's some schlub out there using it (and if he is, please upgrade... this is 2003, for goodness' sake), your wonderful table-based design is worth squat to him. My site, on the other hand, designed with web standards, will look fine in his copy of Netscape 1.0, so if two similar sites were designed--one with web standards and the other without--who is more likely to keep those readers who are disabled or using old or out-of-date browsers?

One final note before I get off my soapbox. If you need proof that you can do more with standards than without, look at K10k. While it does still use tables, the site uses style sheets to do most of the work and as a result, the site looks great. CSS is the way of the future, whether you're designing with or without tables. You'd better get used to it.

IE isn't the only web browser.

I've been a hardcore netizen since 1998, when I used to dial up from my uncle's home to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-) I remember waiting minutes to download a single JPEG file, then transferring it to my local machine using Kermit, and opening it up in Internet Explorer 3.0 on Windows 95, only to realise that it's the wrong one! Those were the days when I learnt to use Pine and Lynx, my favourite mail/www combo.

Those were the days of Internet success stories: ICQ, Napster, Winamp. Remember ShellSock?

In a perfect geek encounter, I met bluesmoon on comp.lang.java. Google didn't even exist back then.

Now, when I look around, I see "techies" with 5-10 years of experience in the software industry and no clue what All Your Base... means :-) Clearly, these guys have been here for the money. I, however, am here because I love it. The Internet is changing lives, and I want to be responsible for some of it. Somebody give me that perfect job! :-D

which is booting in less than a century on my PII-266 / 96M of ram.

Here, this one might work better for you.