Lynx (web browser)

Not to be confused with Links (web browser) or LynxOS.

Lynx

Wikipedia Article displayed in Lynx
Original author(s)	Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe, Charles Rezac
Developer(s)	Thomas Dickey
Initial release	c. 1992
Stable release	2.8.7rel.2  (June 21, 2010 (2010-06-21)) [±]
Preview release	2.8.8dev.8  (January 10, 2011 (2011-01-10)) [±]
Written in	ISO C
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	web browser
License	GNU GPL
Website	lynx.isc.org

Lynx is a very configurable text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals.

History

Lynx was a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas, and was initially developed in 1992 by a team of students at the university (Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac) as a hypertext browser used solely to distribute campus information as part of a Campus-Wide Information Server and for browsing the Gopher space. Beta availability was announced to Usenet on 22 July 1992. In 1993 Montulli added an Internet interface and released a new version (2.0) of the browser.

Lynx is based on a very old version of libwww, dated from 1994. It supports many computer protocols: Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, WAIS, and NNTP. Support for NNTP was added to libwww from ongoing Lynx development in 1994. Support for HTTPS was added to Lynx's fork of libwww later, initially as patches due to concerns about encryption.

Garrett Blythe created DosLynx in April 1994 and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Foteos Macrides ported much of Lynx to VMS and maintained it for a time. In 1995, Lynx was released under the GNU General Public License, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers led by Thomas Dickey.

Features

Lynx and Firefox rendering the same page

Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support SSL and many HTML features. Tables are formatted using spaces, while frames are identified by name and can be explored as if they were separate pages. Lynx cannot inherently display various types of non-text content on the web, such as images and video, but it can launch external programs to handle it, such as an image viewer or a video player.

Unlike most web browsers, Lynx does not support JavaScript and Adobe Flash, which some websites require to work correctly.

Privacy

Because Lynx does not support graphics, web bugs that track user information are not fetched; therefore, web pages can be read without the privacy concerns of graphic web browsers. Still Lynx does support HTTP cookies, which can also be used to track user information. However Lynx supports cookie whitelisting and blacklisting, or alternatively cookie support can be disabled permanently.^{[citation needed]}

Similarly, Lynx also supports browsing histories and page caching,^{[citation needed]} both of which can raise privacy concerns.

Configurability

Lynx accepts configuration options from either command-line options or configuration files. There are 142 command line options according to its help message. The template configuration file lynx.cfg lists 233 configurable features. There is some overlap between the two, however there are command-line options such as -restrict which are not matched in lynx.cfg. In addition to pre-set options by command-line and configuration file, lynx's behavior can be adjusted at runtime using its options menu. Again, there is some overlap between the settings. Lynx implements many of these runtime optional features, optionally (controlled through a setting in the configuration file) allowing the choices to be saved to a separate writable configuration file. The reason for restricting the options which can be saved originated in a usage of lynx which was more common in the mid-1990s, i.e., using lynx itself as a front-end application to the Internet accessed by dial-in connections.

Accessibility

Because of its refreshable braille display and text-to-speech–friendly interface, Lynx can be used for internet access by visually impaired users. As Lynx substitutes images, frames and other non-textual content with the text from alt, name and title HTML attributes and allows hiding the user interface elements, the browser becomes specifically suitable for use with cost-effective general purpose screen reading software. Specifically enhanced version of Lynx for use with screen readers on Windows was developed by IIT Madras.

Use cases

Lynx is also used to check for usability of websites in older browsers. It is still included in a number of Unix products and Linux distributions, and is particularly useful for reading documentation or downloading files when only a text-based environment is available. It is also useful for accessing websites from a remotely connected system in which no graphical display is available. Despite its text-only nature and age, it can still be used to effectively browse much of the modern web, including performing interactive tasks such as editing Wikipedia. Since Lynx will take keystrokes from a text file, it is still very useful for automated data entry, web page navigation, and web scraping. The speed benefits of text-only browsing are most apparent when using low bandwidth internet connections, or older computer hardware that may be slow to render image-heavy content.

Supported platforms

The Logo of the OS/2 port: Lynx/2.

Lynx was originally designed for Unix and VMS and is a popular console browser on Linux. Versions are also available for DOS. Recent versions run on all Microsoft Windows releases, and Mac OS X, both PowerPC and (via Fink) Intel CPUs. There was also an early port to "Classic" Macintosh System 7 and later, called MacLynx. Ports to BeOS, MINIX, QNX, AmigaOS (called ALynx) and OS/2 (called Lynx/2) are also available. Lynx is included with OpenBSD.

See also

• Computer accessibility

External links

• Lynx homepage (old but still cited: doslynx, Lynx links and original)
• Michael Grobe's personal recollections of Lynx development
• Extremely Lynx resource page from version 2.7
• MacLynx
• Mac OS X version at osxgnu.org
• Lynx for Windows 2.8.5rel1 installer
• Lynx on OS/2
• Learn how to use Lynx
• Lynx from FOLDOC