Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained

by jahnu on 3/16/2025, 9:37:59 AM with 109 comments
Kudos to the folks keeping it running.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

  • by andai on 3/16/2025, 12:12:32 PM

    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 :)

  • by kaiwen1 on 3/16/2025, 1:24:37 PM

    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.

  • by esotericwarfare on 3/16/2025, 2:04:12 PM

    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

  • by sylware on 3/16/2025, 10:52:12 AM

    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...

  • by donatj on 3/16/2025, 10:44:50 AM

    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.

  • by susam on 3/16/2025, 12:18:41 PM

    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.
    The C2 Wiki does not load either:

      $ lynx https://wiki.c2.com/
  […]
  javascript required to view this site
                   why
    To their credit, at least they use the <noscript> tag to display the above notices. Some websites don't even bother with that. But there are many old school websites that still load fine to varying degrees:

      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
    If you have more examples, please comment, and I'll add them to this list in the two hour edit window I have.

    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
    Or, in a list of articles, dates and titles may appear jammed together:

      14 Mar 2025The Lost Art of Dual Booting
  15 Mar 2025Some Forgotten Features of Gopher 
  16 Mar 2025My Favourite DOS Games
    The missing spaces aren't obvious in a graphical browser due to the CSS styling hiding the issue, but in a text-based one, the issue becomes apparent. The number of text-based web users may be shrinking, but there are some of us who still browse the web using tools like lynx, w3m, and M-x eww, at least occasionally.

  • by febeling on 3/16/2025, 10:51:28 AM

    I miss websites that look like lynx's: https://lynx.browser.org/

  • by vogelke on 3/16/2025, 10:43:21 AM

    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.

  • by atribecalledqst on 3/16/2025, 11:37:46 AM

    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...

  • by Duanemclemore on 3/16/2025, 3:04:53 PM

    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.

  • by noufalibrahim on 3/16/2025, 12:05:54 PM

    My first browser. There was another one called links which would display graphics inside the terminal.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

  • by nbenitezl on 3/16/2025, 11:42:50 AM

    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.

  • by angled on 3/16/2025, 11:22:57 AM

    Lynx was great, but w3m + gpm for mouse input + fb for graphics was a revelation.

  • by seoulbigchris on 3/16/2025, 12:30:05 PM

    When I first was exposed to Lynx, I was also working on a project using the Lynx realtime Posix OS. To my knowledge, the two aren't related other than by name. I checked a couple of years ago, Lynx OS still exists but under a different name.

  • by miki123211 on 3/16/2025, 12:21:57 PM

    I wish there was a Lynx-like (or, even better, Edbrowse-like) web browser, but powered by something like headless Chromium underneath.

    This way, you could have an extremely low-resource user terminal and/or a laptop on an extremely constrained connection, and still be able to use a modern web by connecting to a more powerful server.

    You could even share such servers between users. Because people aren't all using the web at the same time, you could actually utilize that server capacity a lot more than you can do with laptops.

    It would be even better integrated with an LLM (especially with extremely slow / unreliable / high latency connections).

  • by _fat_santa on 3/16/2025, 3:10:42 PM

    Just tried accessing my personal website[1] with Lynx and it works pretty well. Granted Lynx is pretty crumb some compared to other browsers but like other commenters have said, it's a good tool to have in events where you need to access a particular website and have next to no internet connection.

    EDIT: One thing I am curious about, is there documentation on how to make one's website "lynx friendly". Going through my website it's pretty clean but there are a few areas (like my recipes) that could use adjustment.

    [1]: https://sunny.gg

  • by john-tells-all on 3/16/2025, 2:48:18 PM

    As a web developer, everything is in the editor. A super-fast way to preview my web page changes is:

        lynx --dump localhost:8000/mypage.html
    Put that in a loop. My server or frontend updates appear immediately and I don't have to mess with triggering an external browser or faffing about. Wonderful tool!

  • by 486sx33 on 3/16/2025, 2:31:14 PM

    Like most people my age, my first Internet experience at home was with lynx on a Unix shell. We shared credentials for an account at the school board that we scored from a teachers aid. It was sweet to dial into the school board (same numbers all the teachers used!) and surf around in text only lynx.

  • by kotaKat on 3/16/2025, 1:31:48 PM

    For a while I was using https://habilis.net/lynxlet/ in MacOS to get Lynx as a 'native' browser. It was a nifty wrapper. Sadly lost to time... and 32-bit only. :(

  • by gloosx on 3/17/2025, 6:22:42 AM

    A browser which you can run inside your Vim! Use it all the time in a separate tab for reading compatible websites, including HN and some documentation, very handy!

    Always dreamed about Javascript engine which could render to cli though....

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 3/16/2025, 2:52:20 PM

    Been using a text-only browser daily for over thirty years now. In the early to mid 90's I used Lynx. For me, it is the worst of all the text-only browsers I have tried. I would never go back to using it.

  • by sireat on 3/16/2025, 6:51:21 PM

    I remember a friend at UCLA showed me this fancy schmatcy new Mosaic browser circa 1994 or so.

    I said sure that looks nice, but why would I need this, when I have Lynx...plus Pine for newsgroups and e-mail.

  • by ngneer on 3/16/2025, 2:58:10 PM

    Still use it in the terminal when debugging cloud applications. KUTGW!

  • by boothby on 3/16/2025, 3:23:50 PM

    Due to zoom's resource-intensity and my non-work laptop's dire lack of resources, I find myself using Lynx with some regularity today. I absolutely love it. Thanks, Lynx devs!

  • by ChrisArchitect on 3/16/2025, 6:27:31 PM

    Recent discussion:

    Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119238

  • by anonzzzies on 3/16/2025, 11:22:34 AM

    I cannot wait until vision llms are cheap and fast enough (ran locally of course) to just browse everything with, then I can return to browsing with lynx, or rather, emacs.

  • by rich_sasha on 3/16/2025, 10:21:04 AM

    How usable is Lynx for modern Internet?

    I would love a browser I can operate within tmux, but how does it stack against the modern javascript-laden ecosystem?

  • by camel-cdr on 3/16/2025, 11:39:32 AM

    I use thr shell alias "?" for websearch with lynx. So "$ ? search term"

  • by SweetSoftPillow on 3/16/2025, 10:28:21 AM

    Can we run it in Chrome?

  • by anthk on 3/16/2025, 12:08:57 PM

    I still use it with:

    gopher://hngopher.com (for actual HN I use Links)

    gopher://magical.fish (Huge portal)

    gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia (Internet Archive)

    gopher://sdf.org (Tech blogs and code mainly)

    https://neuters.de (news)

    https://m.xkcd.com and a external viewer