[HN Gopher] Text-based web browsers
___________________________________________________________________
Text-based web browsers
Author : pabs3
Score : 270 points
Date : 2026-01-13 05:16 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cssence.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cssence.com)
| rickcarlino wrote:
| > 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.
| esseph wrote:
| Hmmm
|
| I have no idea how this would work just brainstorming.
|
| Could you.. use some browser backend to render the page to a
| PDF, then an LLM to scrape the content and display it as text?
|
| I know it wouldn't be exactly efficient, but...
| worksonmine wrote:
| A more pragmatic approach would be to run the content through
| something like readability[0] but leaves navigation
| untouched. The AI could hallucinate and add content that
| isn't in the original, something accessibility tools don't.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
| ploum wrote:
| This is exactly what Offpunk is doing: displaying the html
| page after it passed throught Readability.
|
| https://offpunk.net
|
| The whole page is still available with "view full" (or "v
| full")
|
| In the current trunk, if configured, it uses ftr-site-
| config rules to extract content for specific websites (
| https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config )
|
| I do 90% of my browsing using Offpunk (reading blogs and
| articles) and, suprizingly, it often works better than a
| graphical browser (no ads, no popup, no paywall). Of
| course, it doesn't work when you really needs JS.
| anthk wrote:
| Dillo uses something similar with rdrview, you can use
| rdrview://$URL (altough I hacked the dpi plugin to use
| the rd:// 'protocol' for shortness).
|
| It lacks the filter thingy _but_ now has the dilloc tool
| where it can print the current URL, open a new page...
| and with sed you can trivially reopen a page with an
| alternative from https://farside.link
|
| You know, medium.com -> scribe.rip and the like.
|
| But Dillo is not a terminal browser, altough it's a
| really barebones one and thanks to DPI and dilloc it can
| be really powerful (gopher, gemini, ipfs, man, -info in
| the future) and so on available as simple plugins, either
| in sh, C or even Go) and inspiring for both offpunk and
| w3m (where it has similar capabilities as Dillo to
| print/mangle URL's and the like).
|
| What I'd love is to integrate Apertium (or any
| translating service) with Dillo as a plugin so by just
| running trans://example.com you could get any page
| translated inline without running tons of Google
| propietary JS to achieve the same task.
|
| I love the https://linux.org.ru forum and often they post
| interesting setups but I don't speak Russian.
| ploum wrote:
| So you mean that someone use LLM to generate a website full
| of JS, post a text in it and then we use LLM to try to
| rebuild the original content?
|
| If only we had a way to just share text without all those
| steps...
| esseph wrote:
| You're misunderstanding.
|
| You go to site with your text browser. An LLM loads and
| renders the content in memory and then is helping to
| convert that to a text only interface for your tui browser
| to display and navigate.
|
| Apparently other systems are using a similar method.
| harendra007 wrote:
| Quick question on gemini://, I have no idea what gemini:// is
| but I typed gemini:// on my mac and it prompted to open my
| iterm shell. Is this a normal behavior, I am using chrome
| browser.
| filmor wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
|
| It is a simpler web and requires a separate browser or a
| plugin. It's difficult to find resources on it nowadays
| because of Google Gemini...
| ks2048 wrote:
| There's a tool called lsregister on macOS to show claimed
| schemes for different apps. Mine shows for iTerm2,
| claimed schemes: ftp:, gemini:, gopher:, http:,
| https:, iterm2:, mailto:, news:, nntp:, ssh:, telnet:,
| titan:, wais:, whois:, x-man-page:
| ploum wrote:
| Probably because you could install Terminal Gemini clients
| like Amfora or Offpunk.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Totally valid points.
|
| By the way, only on re-reading your comment, I realised you're
| taking about the Gemini protocol and not the AI engine!
| rglullis wrote:
| What's the difference between "let's encourage people to create
| gemini documents" and "let's encourage people to publish
| text/markdown documents on the www"?
| ploum wrote:
| That's subtle but the Gemtext format is really really
| constrained, which forces people to do one thing: write text.
| Nothing else.
|
| So, when you are on Gemini://, you know that you will only
| encounter linear text. You will read stuff, written by other
| people. It is really relaxing. I'm a huge fan of Gemini.
|
| I would advice to start your Gemini journey by reading links
| on Antenna and Cosmos (which are link aggregators)
|
| https://offpunk.net/gemini.html
| rglullis wrote:
| > I'm a huge fan of Gemini.
|
| I'm not. I get the whole "the medium is the message" and
| why it feels appealing to some, but I don't subscribe to
| the idea that the only way to have proper digital hygiene
| is by restraining myself to this ascetic channel. I'd
| rather encourage more people to put content on the web in
| whatever form they think is best, and I'll let it up to my
| user agent to filter out the noise.
| wibbily wrote:
| The dream of course would be both: if you're already writing
| textual content you might as well publish it on both
| protocols, so anyone can get to it with any tool they like.
| Gemtext can be trivially converted up to Markdown, the
| opposite is lossy but very doable.
| ploum wrote:
| I'm such a Gemini fan that I'm developing a browser which try
| to extract content from webpages to turn them into Gemini pages
| ;-)
|
| And it works Offline too by caching every request:
| https://offpunk.net
| anthk wrote:
| Add a limit on catching (requests per second); if not, tons
| of Gopher servers will kick me out fast by syncing most
| phlogs in batch mode :)
|
| Also, there's no way to reuse w3mimgdisplay in the same way
| w3m works for the web?
|
| Finally, I can't find a way to display images with 256
| colours by default even if the TERM variable it's set to
| xterm-256color .
|
| And, no, I can't use sixels by default under OpenBSD's xterm.
| Sixel and maybe tektroniks support are disabled at build
| time.
|
| EDIT: a good start for w3mimgdisplay:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210920101125/http://blog.z3bra.
| ..
| qznc wrote:
| I really like reading text with variable-width fonts. Gemini
| requires fixed-width fonts due to its terminal-based approach.
| Thus, I have no desire to use it ever.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I've only dabbled in Gemini so I don't know their names off
| the top of my head, but I tried out a number of GUI Gemini
| browsers in the past, and they're quite nice. Easy on the
| eyes, simple design, all the variable width fonts you could
| ask for if that's your bag.
| ploum wrote:
| No. There are graphical browser like Lagrange. It is up to
| you.
| CIPHERSTONE wrote:
| Gemini is my go to now when I need a recipe. Pick a recipe
| site, any recipe site, and its guaranteed to be the most
| painful experience on mobile, and slightly less painful on a
| laptop experience you have on the web. Pure fucking trash. And
| if you happen to be a recipe publisher who does this and is
| reading this, fuck you.
|
| Enter Gemini. It consistently can give me a text only version
| of the recipe that I can copy into a notes app if I want with
| zero pain. Zero. Now I have my own set of "wtf are you doing
| Gemini" and "why are you halucinating on this request"
| experiences at work with Gemini, but recipe extraction.. the
| goat.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Wrong Gemini, the above poster is talking about the protocol,
| you are talking about the LLM
| xelxebar wrote:
| 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
| anthk wrote:
| I used to use that to fetch odd Japanese translated ROMs from
| CD Romance. Inb4 some Copyright holder says "buy them
| legally"... these games won't be released in the West ever.
|
| In Europe most people played Earthbound (and USA only releases
| for SNES/MD) under emulators. That's how Nintendo put it in the
| Super Smash Bros roster. They say the hate emulation; but these
| tools cemented themselves into retroemulation like no other
| system, and helped to bring new sagas to the West. For free.
| You say you lost money because of retro-piracy? You got free
| marketing for physical scraps technically resting in a
| warehouse.
|
| Altough nowadays I'm 100% pro libre gaming; tons of indie/FOSS
| philosophy overlap: FreedroidRPG, Battle for Wesnoth,
| Nethack/Slashem, ReTux, SuperTux2...
|
| Back to edbrowse, it's a mail, irc and SQL client too; and you
| can script it, a la ed/vi, so you can do magic here.
| ploum wrote:
| edbrowse is awesome. I fear that most people, like OP in this
| case, don't really understand the difference between "TUI"
| (where a terminal is used to display a GUI) and "CLI", where
| every interaction is a written command resulting in a output.
|
| I've a perfect sight myself but I really like the comfort of
| linearity with CLI: I ask my computer something, I receive an
| answer.
|
| (that's probably why I'm developping my own CLI browser but is
| more graphical and less advanced than edbrowse)
| isametry wrote:
| > my own CLI browser but is more graphical
|
| So based on the first paragraph, I would've assumed "CLI" and
| "graphical" were mutually exclusive? Did you in fact mean to
| type "TUI" here? Or is your program something like a hybrid
| between command-based input and graphical output?
| anthk wrote:
| No, Offpunk it's command line driven, it just happens it
| can output images due to sixel support (and maybe in a near
| future with the w3m's image displaying tool).
| jmholla wrote:
| You could also take a look at chafa[0] for supporting
| terminals without sixel.
|
| [0]: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
| godelski wrote:
| Chafa will build with sixel. I've gotten best results
| with chafa using sixel, better than kitty
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I fear that most people, _like OP in this case_ , don't
| really understand the difference between "TUI" (where a
| terminal is used to display a GUI) and "CLI", where every
| interaction is a written command resulting in a output.
|
| I'm not sure how you could infer that, since OP didn't
| mention "TUI" or "GUI" or "CLI" anywhere in this post, and a
| text-based browser UI could come in either form.
| cess11 wrote:
| Looks cool, thanks for recommending it.
|
| I usually go with w3m for my weirder needs that lie somewhere
| between a pure HTTP client and a regular web browser, this
| seems like it might be even more convenient sometimes.
| dieggsy wrote:
| 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/
| balazs4 wrote:
| This!
|
| `chawan` is really good. I use it very often, and it looks very
| promising.
|
| If you are into ,,browsing the web in terminal", you should try
| it.
| mariusor wrote:
| Yep, that's me. :) It's cool when blogs incorporate ActivityPub
| comments to them.
|
| I liked chawan from the first time it was shown here on HN,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44293260. It made me add
| support for CSS Grid API in my sites targeting text browsers.
| AdInside6 wrote:
| Another impressive TUI browser would be
| https://codeberg.org/janantos/brow6el
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _text-mode web browser_
|
| > _inline images inside the terminal_
|
| Now I'm confused
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Image support has been present in numerous terminal-mode
| browsers for many years if not decades, generally implemented
| through the framebuffer, though in some cases the browser
| will spawn an external image viewer (presuming a graphical
| environment, e.g., Xorg / Wayland).
| omoikane wrote:
| Using Sixel graphics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
|
| https://www.arewesixelyet.com/
|
| (and also kitty protocol)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| How does Cloudflare handle text-based browsers? Do they
| immediately flag them as bots?
| peetistaken wrote:
| Yes
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Poorly.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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
| michaelanckaert wrote:
| I often use DuckDuckGo in HTML mode
| (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/) when I'm using EWW in
| Emacs.
| Tmpod wrote:
| There's also the even more barebones DDG Lite:
| https://lite.duckduckgo.com
|
| I use it often when on very slow or metered connections
| (still find some of those around).
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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?
| bjourne wrote:
| Cookie pop-ups are mandatory so you need something.
| prmoustache wrote:
| No, they are only mandatory if you use third party cookies
| and tracking platforms.
|
| Consent is not necessary for strictly functional first party
| cookies. Session and shop cart cookies are examples of that.
|
| This very site you are commenting on doesn't need a cookie
| consent form/popup for example.
|
| The presence of a cookie banner in the first place is a sign
| that the website you are visiting is run by a bad actor who
| is into selling your profile and browsing data.
| ploum wrote:
| It should be said again and again that:
|
| 1. There's no law requiring a cookie popup.
|
| 2. In Europe, most Cookie popup are, in fact, completely
| illegal
|
| 3. Most cookie popup come from the same actor who designed
| them to be, on purpose, as annoying as possible in order to
| decrease the popular support for the EU GDPR law.
|
| https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| This cannot be repeated enough.
| al_borland wrote:
| Is there a central place to report bad actors for #2 so
| the EU goes after them?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > 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
|
| I don't see how - popovers are arguably worse for ads (because
| easier for the ad blocker to find them, versus random divs
| flowed into the page), and modal dialogs are a pretty common
| thing in rich web apps.
| asgerhb wrote:
| > Having content you want to hide?
|
| This has some use cases. Besides, keeping content from users
| was already present in HTML through the practice of not sending
| it to the user.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or through foreground/background colour settings. Which ...
| most terminal-based browsers will ignore or override.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| mariusor wrote:
| I mentioned it in another comment, but @media: grid[1] support
| can help distinguish the user agents that are text-mode.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
| demetris wrote:
| I did that that recently for a couple of personal projects and
| I like it. I think I will start doing it for client sites too.
|
| https://omnicarousel.dev
|
| The main navigation menu is just above the site footer in the
| HTML document.
|
| Question for people who know that stuff:
|
| What is the recommended way of hiding features that require
| JavaScript on browsers that do not support JavaScript, e.g., on
| w3m?
| miki123211 wrote:
| > The main navigation menu is just above the site footer in
| the HTML document.
|
| Just letting you know, that stuff is a bit confusing to
| screen reader users.
|
| Though I really wish we standardized on putting content
| first, like mobile apps do. At least we woulnd't haave to
| explain to new screen reader users why getting to the f???ing
| article is so damn hard if you don't know the right
| incantations to do it quickly.
| demetris wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Would a _Jump to navigation_ link next to _Skip to content_
| make this arrangement better for screen reader users?
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| "What is the recommended way of hiding features that require
| JavaScript on browsers that do not support JavaScript, e.g.,
| on w3m?"
|
| You can try the <noscript> tag.
| zenmac wrote:
| Best thing about sites that works in TUI browser is that it can
| also work in Tor Browser "Safest" mode. In fact to those who
| are saying that these text based website are anti feature. I
| would argue that it is a safety feature to be able to browse
| and work in Tor Browser "Safest" mode. In fact ALL web page
| should strive to work in "Safest" mode, and only throw in bells
| and whistles when needed. As one can see just by turn on JS the
| site is NO longer really safe.
| cons0le wrote:
| Let me ask you, is TOR even still safe or worth it?
|
| I'm seriously asking cause I don't know. I heard that the US
| govt runs a lot of the exit nodes now. So maybe it's safe, as
| long as you don't live in the US?
| kps wrote:
| For the (small, noncommercial) sites I help with, we've always
| had at least a 'jump to content' link at the very top, hidden
| by CSS, dating back to when lynx was my main browser. In
| practice today, it's more for people using screen readers.
| RockieYang wrote:
| Niche idea. It could filter out a lot of noise
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| rhdunn wrote:
| Text-based browsers are useful in cases where you don't have
| access to a graphical display, for example:
|
| 1. your graphics driver isn't loading/working;
|
| 2. you can't log into the GUI due to a bug in the login screen;
|
| 3. you are working on a server that is headless, i.e. doesn't
| have a GUI installed, or are SSHing into a server/other
| machine.
|
| I've experienced (2) a while ago and more recently there was
| another issue recently with upgrading breaking a system [1]. I
| also encountered the latter but was unable to keep the terminal
| open due to that bug (it kept switching back to the login
| screen), so I had to boot into a system via a USB stick, chroot
| into the system, then install the uninstalled desktop package.
|
| [1]
| https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/ubuntu-25-04-upgrades-...
| charcircuit wrote:
| >your graphics driver isn't loading/working
|
| This is a bigger problem that should be fixed ASAP. OS
| vendors should never critically break graphics on a OS like
| this.
|
| >you can't log into the GUI due to a bug in the login screen;
|
| Again, the QA department or automated tests of your OS vendor
| should not let this get released. If such a bug happened
| there should be a fix rolled out immediately.
|
| >you are working on a server that is headless
|
| Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't
| think of a case where you would want to use a text browser
| there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
|
| >so I had to boot into a system via a USB stick, chroot into
| the system, then install the uninstalled desktop package.
|
| It's disappointing that you had to manually fix it compared
| to it just downloading a fix automatically like what would
| happen on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.
| anthk wrote:
| Third party driver vendors can crap out a graphical login
| pretty trivially.
|
| If your driver messes up DWM.exe it can blow your whole
| compositing service and draw every window in software mode
| which is, without exaggerating, 10000x slower than Direct
| Draw/GDI back in the day.
|
| Ever played an old Direct Draw game on Windows 8 and up? It
| will _crawl_. The game can only be played with WineD3D,
| which is basically a Wine build for Windows and it has
| ddraw.dll hoooked to its own DirectX or OpenGL libraries.
| This is the only way to get these games running fast again.
|
| On software rendering for the whole desktop, the same. A
| text mode browser (or Dillo, or Links2) can be runable at
| useable speeds before downloading an updated driver or
| patch.
|
| By the moment you try Chromium or Firefox with no
| acceleration (even under current machines), when you have
| to run both DWM.exe, the rendering process and desktop done
| with software rendering in CPU, it will slow down like hell
| because on top of that it will run some JS crap in the
| browser for granted on vendor driver pages.
|
| Maybe a current i7 can withstand it, but not for long as
| browsers love to spawn threads and eat RAM like crazy. Add
| a 4K display and say goodbye to performance.
| bloovis wrote:
| > Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't
| think of a case where you would want to use a text browser
| there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
|
| I've had to do that on my VPS a few times when I was
| debugging my Apache setup and needed to look at a web page
| that was only visible on the VPS, i.e., not available to
| the outside world.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Honestly I really agree with this use case and I even
| created a point asking for some browser like this but one
| which is more capable than even browsh perhaps, I am not
| sure if text is just the right choice, we need something
| between text and complete vnc install or debugging
| instance
|
| You can take a look at pinggy.io / tunnl.gg and so many
| other options where you can just use the standard ssh
| command to port forward a port for some time and so you
| can debug it
|
| I recommend you to take a look at this as well
| https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-
| tunneling?tab=readme...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Why do you need to run the browser on the server?
|
| I often need to authenticate against one of my Fediverse
| servers (as part of `toot login` for getting access tokens)
| and it's easier to open Lynx (which toot will do directly)
| for that on the server than copy+paste to and from a "real"
| browser.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Most terminals let you just click a link from the
| terminal to open it in your browser. The convience of an
| actual browser trumps a text only browser so I think it
| would end up being the experience most users would
| prefer.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Most terminals let you just click a link from the
| terminal to open it in your browser.
|
| Which involves moving my hands off the keyboard and to
| the mouse/trackball/trackpad. With the text browser
| option, I don't have to move my hands anywhere.
| cess11 wrote:
| One of my main uses for text browsers is scraping. They are
| typically lightweight and efficient, easy to script
| against, and I won't end up with premature optimisations
| where I immediately parse out small pieces of information
| and discard the rest of the page. Instead I store the dumps
| and can return to them at a later time when the problem
| domain changes or I have learned more about it.
| iamnothere wrote:
| > This is a bigger problem that should be fixed ASAP. OS
| vendors should never critically break graphics on a OS like
| this.
|
| > Again, the QA department or automated tests of your OS
| vendor should not let this get released. If such a bug
| happened there should be a fix rolled out immediately.
|
| On a Linux system, if you go messing around with your
| configuration enough, you will eventually break something.
| You are effectively your own QA department in this case. As
| a kid I did this often, it's part of the learning process.
|
| > Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't
| think of a case where you would want to use a text browser
| there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.
|
| You just need to look something up quickly to fix something
| and you are in front of the server. Or you need to download
| a configuration file from GitHub and the URL is really
| long, but you can get there in a few seconds from a web
| browser. There are other means to get the files to the
| server but they require more effort, and you are lazy (as
| is your right).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >if you go messing around with your configuration enough,
| you will eventually break something
|
| If changing a setting breaks your OS that badly, that is
| a high priority bug that your OS vendor should fix
| immediately.
|
| >You are effectively your own QA department in this case.
|
| Linux users should hold their OS vendors to a higher
| standard than accepting that a user should become QA.
|
| >You just need to look something up quickly to fix
| something and you are in front of the server.
|
| Typically if you are in front of a server you have a
| client capable of running a web browser.
|
| >Or you need to download a configuration file from GitHub
| and the URL is really long
|
| Copy paste is fast even with a long URL.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > Linux users should hold their OS vendors to a higher
| standard than accepting that a user should become QA.
|
| Yeah I'm going to demand my money back next time I break
| X.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Blink twice if you are trapped in Windows and need help.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Is it an OS vendor "bug" if I delete system32.dll
| (despite all the warnings) or remove my hard drive and
| flush it down the toilet?
|
| Maybe we have a different idea of what constitutes a
| "bug." In my view, preventing users from running their
| preferred software or configuring their machine however
| the hell they want to is the "bug." Forcing AI into every
| nook and cranny is a "bug." So your OS vendor can shove
| it. _I am my own OS vendor._
| basscomm wrote:
| Text-based browsers are also great for just reading hypertext
| documents. I've been using a combination of a text-based rss
| reader and web browser to keep up with the sites I care
| about, and I can tear through my collection of articles
| pretty quickly
| tvali wrote:
| 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.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Interesting find mentioned in the comments - https://chawan.net/
| sylware wrote:
| 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.
| cons0le wrote:
| Carbonyl is still the goat
|
| https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
| thw_9a83c wrote:
| 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/
| tcbawo wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| You can get some of the way there with an Amiga.
| maxglute wrote:
| Would be nice to have local model inject web content and spit out
| reader mode text on every page.
| moron4hire wrote:
| 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.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| It's covered on MDN:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
| jibal wrote:
| > and what enrages me the most
|
| So go fork and fix an open source browser to your satisfaction.
| icar wrote:
| > 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/
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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?
| siraben wrote:
| 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
| Koshkin wrote:
| A.k.a. "terminal-based"
| Koshkin wrote:
| _links_ is my favorite file browser and pager
| ynac wrote:
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| AI can make sense of the page with CSS, JS, etc and transform
| the page for the preferences of the user. A true user agent.
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| 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.
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