Web browsers - Lynx (Lynx)

Member Name: Andwynn

Product:	Lynx
Date:	26/07/00 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: zippy zippy fast

Disadvantages: lots of pages aren't designed for it

Lynx is a non-graphical, text only, plain, bread and butter web browser.
And I would now be absolutely lost without it. Ok, it doesn't do flash,
it doesn't do java, it doesn't do javascript and it won't even show you
images without a bit of playing around. But by god it's fast. None of
this faffing about downloading 200 images per page or freezing as it
parses your table for displaying. Just straight in there, fetch the
text, and display. Yum.

It's true, a lot of sites aren't designed for non-graphical browsers
any more. But then, a lot of sites aren't designed for people with
small displays either - it's the fault of the web designed, not the
display.

A fully patched version of Lynx handles tables beautifully, is easy to
read using colour, navigation is a doddle using the cursor keys, cookies
and bookmarks are available, and frames are handled adequately, if not
perfectly. The only thing it really needs is basic javascript handling
(as filling in a form then finding that it uses javascript to submit it
for some reason known only to the designer is extremely annoying)

I think most unix systems have Lynx installed as default now, but if
you want the latest distribution, it can be found at http://lynx.browser.org/
- I believe it can even be installed under windows.

As I demonstrated to a friend who was struggling with a 3-hour download
of a large text document from an American university, if nothing else,
it can go grab your text files in a couple of minutes instead of a
couple of hours.

I love my Lynx.

Summary: