Elinks or Lynx?

Question

Please, state your reasons for your terminal browser. Why are you using Lynx or Elinks? How do they help you in programming?

Answer 1

I use them as a rough visual metaphor for what it must be like to use a screen-reader. When I am addressing accessibility concerns I use Lynx to check the page when I don't have access to a screen-reader.

Why do I use Lynx? Because I wasn't aware of any alternatives!

Answer 2

Lynx, because sometimes I want to look something up without getting sucked into a GUI. But it's getting increasingly less frequent over the years, as the slowly but steadily increasing overhead of firing up X has failed to keep up with Moore's Death March of performance.

At this point I pretty much keep a GUI shell up and don't even worry about it.

-- MarkusQ

Answer 3

If you're asking which I prefer for a more complete browsing experience, I prefer Elinks. It has tabbed browsing, download/password managing, and tabbed navigation (handy when in a terminal). It also (partially) supports CSS 2.1, (fully) supports frames. It also (partially) supports JavaScript. Not as important, but Elinks supports more protocols than Lynx (I specifically use the Bittorrent protocol).

If you're asking which is more suitable for testing text-only browsers, Lynx is probably more popular, but Elinks is still a great choice here as well.

You can see some of the browser comparisons here.

Answer 4

CLI web browsers are still sometimes noticeably faster than GUI browsers.

More importantly, they're also more distraction-free (no images, JavaScript, Flash, etc.), in much the same vein as apps like WriteRoom.

Answer 5

Two reasons for using lynx:

1. It's a great way to see a lower-level of the HTTP transaction going on with the server (though, of course, you can do this with curl and such tools, but it's a pain to post forms in those tools :-) ).
2. I can test whether or not my HTML really holds up to a lesser browsing experience where users have images turned off... I can verify that the ALT tags make sense, etc.