What's your favorite non-graphical web browser?

[vailixi]

I've been checking out non-graphical web browsers lately. Are the old school terminal browsers more secure? Fewer features means less to go wrong right?

What are your thoughts on the subject?

[cooper]

I find them to be unusable, because none support javascript. And yes, that's a sad conclusion to come to, but here's my problem:

I have a Samsung Chromebook, the original ARM one. It's running Gentoo (obviously) but the kernel on here is such that it's incapable of supporting swap and I've yet to find a way to fix that. The machine has 2GB ram which is plenty for most things, but if you want to build either Firefox or Chromium you need at least 3GB. And that's no idle threat either - I've built OpenSCAD on it and I only just managed to build it from within X. I literally had to close *everything* before doing the build and had to restrict the building process to a single thread (it's a dual-core machine, so this meant it simply took twice as long).

My problem is that in order to use this machine at work I first need to click the "Agree" button on a page from a captive portal and, sadly, this works via javascript. So without a working browser that does javascript, I, for all intents and purposes, don't have network connectivity at all. I tried to find a binary distribution of either of these browsers, but they seem to only get made for intel-based platforms. The solution I eventually found was Midori which is a webkit-based browser. It's got some rough edges, but it does what I want in a nice and lightweight package.

I've tried to use things like Links2 which, out of the text-based browsers seems to be the best, but the page interaction is such that it just doesn't work for me. I want to scroll so that the bit I'm reading is always in the center, not read a full page and then hop on to the next chunk, which might actually just be 2 lines long. Navigating to the correct link on a screen using the cursor is a pain. I've yet to encounter a web page that works fine in a regular browser but also still works sensibly in a text-based browser. It's just a world that website builders don't cater to when they design their stuff.

Bottom line - to me, text-based browsers are a gimmick and not much more.

[vailixi]

I didn't really think about captive portals and actually needing javascript in writing this post. I was kinda enjoying links2 for it's simplicity. The terminal browsers seem to be a lot less distacting. I've enen thought about just getting the page and stripping it down to plain text if it's a page that doesn't require interaction. I seem to spend a lot of time navigating pages, waiting for 100 different scripts or ads to load when all I want to do is read the content. Seems these days a lot of web pages are optimized for ultra fast internet connections and depending on a person's location that might not be the case. Not that it's a really big deal for me. I'm kinda a dinosaur in that I was doing web design in 2003 when there are still a lot of people on 56k and you wanted to create a page that would load ultra fast even for dial up users. Minimal images, scripts, calls to exterior resources. Seems like these days you connect to a site and it is calling resources from 50 or so other servers and taking a minute to load. It's just annoying. I have a fairly and fast computer and a decent internet connection. But it still feels like the AOL days.

I will check out Midori. Thanks for the link.

Edited October 14, 2015 by vailixi

[barry99705]

May as well just use curl. You'll get the same garbage either way.