- One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful:
- Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
- Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs;
- Reading articles (e.g. Wikipedia) feels closer to reading a book;
- It even supports JavaScript to a degree!
- The affordances of line-oriented editing carry over nicely.
In particular, when using line-oriented interfaces, it's quite natural to build up a small collection of context-dependent snippets from documentation, source code, sample code, whatever. Putting a small collage of these on the screen is effortless and an experience I do miss with other UI paradigms.The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!
[0]:https://github.com/edbrowse/edbrowse
- The top comment in the article mentions it, but chawan[1] is really quite neat. Many sites are still have their quirks (or may be broken), but I think it's the closest I've seen a text browser approximate a "real" browser. The support for CSS, JS, and images (depends on your terminal) is already quite impressive even if imperfect. To my knowledge it's an actual browser implementation rather than "cheating" by using an existing browser like browsh (which is still quite cool).
[1] https://chawan.net/
- For many, if not most, of the sites I regularly visit, text based browsers work surprisingly fine. My main complaint is actually the structure of the html. In many cases sites could improve massively, if they moved navigation to below the actual content. Having a large vertical menu taking up the entire screen as the first thing you see is slightly annoying.
- From the article: In this article I’m not going to include the admittedly cool browsh, because...
These browsers are cool but I didn't know about browsh [1]. That one is also really cool. Thanks!
[1]: https://www.brow.sh/
- > When viewing a web page in a text-based browser, you essentially get plain HTML, no CSS, no JS. There is some “styling”, a result of the elements’ semantics, but don’t expect anything fancy, we are down to colors, indentation, and centered text.
Reminds me of Gemini protocol.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- If websites removed all CSS and JS, they could still provide almost all the worthwhile content that's currently available, and browsers could become user agents again.
- Sadly and disgustingly, I fired up lynx last night and found out that Google will not allow you to search with it anymore. I guess this change happened a few months ago and there was an HN thread about it[0], but I hadn't noticed until now.
Going to altavista still works great (even though it just redirects you to yahoo ;)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201692
by PeterStuer
2 subcomments
- How does Cloudflare handle text-based browsers? Do they immediately flag them as bots?
by prmoustache
3 subcomments
- Most of the features mentionned in this blog post seem really anti-user to me:
Popover seems to be a way to do popup that you can't really block. Also having content you want to hide?
- I remember using Lynx as a daily driver 30 years ago. It was fast, and barely had any compatibility issues because HTML that time was simpler. I remember using it as a daily driver. A GUI browser would be handy with image-heavy web sites, but those would take ages to load anyway.
It seems like Lynx failed to guide new standards, and that hindered the development of web in a text-compatible way. So, we ended up with this where Lynx is probably not usable at all today.
It would have been a net win for accessibility too if we always had Lynx et al in our sights.
by Imustaskforhelp
0 subcomment
- I think it might be offtopic but is there any way that there are minimalist browsers which can work on let's say vps's but I wouldn't need to host a complete vnc server or set up with the debugging port magic of puppeteer or chrome
I think browsh which is a text based web browser is the most recommended for something like this but browsh doesnt map things 1 to 1 and there are still some issues. I wish if there was a simple browsh alternative which could use new image protocols in terminal (I think kitty protocol or other comes to my mind) to basically act as a complete browser.
Does anyone know of anything like this? I sometimes like the idea of just leaving a tab completely open 24x7 on a vps, I feel like there can be interesting data which can happen because of it. Thoughts?
by moron4hire
1 subcomments
- The note that someone told them DataList might be bad for accessibility is the first I'm hearing of it. Does anyone know what is meant by this?
This reminds me of a problem I've been having with some accessibility issues: maybe, sometimes, occasionally, the accessibility problems a site has aren't the authors' fault but the fault of the folks writing the screen reader software. I've tried using screen reader software and it is an awful experience. It's nearly impossible to create a good experience for screen readers because they are all their own, unique microcosm of unstandardized garbage and bugs.
by charcircuit
1 subcomments
- >w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.
w3m's marketshare has always been nonexistent. It already has been in oblivion. Having a GUI is key to making a good web browser that will be used by people.
- Honestly, with terminal emulators these days I'd love to see a new attempt at making a TUI based browsers. I don't need video, but we got sixel these days for images. But being able to stay in my terminal or put a Google search docs or some other thing in a tmux pane would be really awesome. I'm sure the LLMs would love them too, if that helps for any motivation.
- Carbonyl is still the goat
https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
- browsh and carbonyl[0] are such lifesavers on airplane wifi. I find that carbonyl has even better chromium rendering than browsh.
[0] https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
- I had an idea once for connecting an old 8-bit computer to the modern web by connecting to a text-based web browser running on another device using the terminal. Maybe one day when I find more time.
- They could be used in bloody fast AI crawling and browse, for example dynamic webbased finetuning which involves non-static content: I think GET requests are safe in this matter.
by yashasolutions
0 subcomment
- Interesting find mentioned in the comments - https://chawan.net/
- Would be nice to have local model inject web content and spit out reader mode text on every page.
by rickcarlino
7 subcomments
- > Text-based browsers and modern HTML, no success story in sight. Given the progress we see in web technologies, the gap will only widen, so much so that w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.
This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.
People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.
Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.
- links is my favorite file browser and pager
- A.k.a. "terminal-based"
- Having to navigate to and from online plain text files (usually .txt) I like a browser to recognize addresses with or without HTTP and see them as links. It's a surprisingly tricky feature to find in browsers (right click, grab and ask, etc.). I wrote a tiny browser to do just that for the command line and it's cute and all, but I'm anxious to interview all the browsers in here to see which have this ability.
- You do not need much more than a semantic 2D table with proper navigation ids. Does wonders with basic HTML forms. You can augment it with a simple CSS in order to give to it a nice look. A troubling issue is "border" in semantic tables: they are a semantic information, not style, it should not be deprecated.
Tested edbrowse javascript, hardly anything works. Maybe the edbrowse developer should get closer to netsurf libraries and work there on quickjs support.
by RockieYang
0 subcomment
- Niche idea. It could filter out a lot of noise
- > and what enrages me the most
So go fork and fix an open source browser to your satisfaction.
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