Best terminal web browser
Which terminal web browser do people here actually use day to day, and why that one over the others?
I switched to w3m two years ago and never went back. Inline images in the terminal sound like a gimmick until you read a bug report with a screenshot in it and the screenshot is simply there, in the same window, without a browser tab in sight.
permalink reply save reportNobody has mentioned links yet, which surprises me. It handles tables far better than lynx does, and the mouse support in the framebuffer version is genuinely useful when a page insists on being a grid.
permalink reply save reportFor reading news I use w3m with a readability filter in front of it. The filter strips the navigation and the cookie banners before w3m ever sees them, so a news article arrives as an article instead of as a menu with an article somewhere inside it.
permalink reply save reportelinks deserves a mention for its tabs and its bookmark handling. It is the closest thing to a graphical browser that still runs over ssh, and the configuration file is plain and documented rather than a maze of hidden preferences.
permalink reply save reportThe honest answer is that it depends on the page. You will use links for sites with tables, w3m for anything with images, and lynx when you want the fastest possible path from a url to the text on it. Keeping all three costs a few megabytes.
permalink reply save reportI run lynx inside tmux on a small server and read my mail queue reports with it. No javascript means no surprises, and a page that needs javascript to show me a number was never going to be a page I wanted to read anyway.
permalink reply save reportw3m with the readable extension is my default. The extension is what makes the difference: without it you get the whole page, navigation and all, and with it you get the part a person would actually want to read.
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Lynx is the one I keep coming back to. It is fast, it never surprises me, and it renders documentation pages better than anything else I have tried in a terminal. The keybindings take an afternoon to learn and then they are yours forever, which is the opposite of how most software works.
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