One of my favorite pieces of software is edbrowse[0]. Perhaps surprisingly, I find it quite useful:
- Main developer is blind, so accessibility has priority;
- Easily scriptable; think automating captive portal clickthroughs;
- Reading articles (e.g. Wikipedia) feels closer to reading a book;
- It even supports JavaScript to a degree!
- The affordances of line-oriented editing carry over nicely.
In particular, when using line-oriented interfaces, it's quite natural to build up a small collection of context-dependent snippets from documentation, source code, sample code, whatever. Putting a small collage of these on the screen is effortless and an experience I do miss with other UI paradigms.
The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!
edbrowse is awesome. I fear that most people, like OP in this case, don’t really understand the difference between "TUI" (where a terminal is used to display a GUI) and "CLI", where every interaction is a written command resulting in a output.
I’ve a perfect sight myself but I really like the comfort of linearity with CLI: I ask my computer something, I receive an answer.
(that’s probably why I’m developping my own CLI browser but is more graphical and less advanced than edbrowse)
anthk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I used to use that to fetch odd Japanese translated ROMs from CD Romance. Inb4 some Copyright holder says "buy them legally"... these games won't be released in the West ever.
In Europe most people played Earthbound (and USA only releases for SNES/MD) under emulators. That's how Nintendo put it in the Super Smash Bros roster. They say the hate emulation; but these tools cemented themselves into retroemulation like no other system, and helped to bring new sagas to the West. For free. You say you lost money because of retro-piracy? You got free marketing for physical scraps technically resting in a warehouse.
Altough nowadays I'm 100% pro libre gaming; tons of indie/FOSS philosophy overlap: FreedroidRPG, Battle for Wesnoth, Nethack/Slashem, ReTux, SuperTux2...
Back to edbrowse, it's a mail, irc and SQL client too; and you can script it, a la ed/vi, so you can do magic here.
mrweasel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For many, if not most, of the sites I regularly visit, text based browsers work surprisingly fine. My main complaint is actually the structure of the html. In many cases sites could improve massively, if they moved navigation to below the actual content. Having a large vertical menu taking up the entire screen as the first thing you see is slightly annoying.
dieggsy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The top comment in the article mentions it, but chawan[1] is really quite neat. Many sites are still have their quirks (or may be broken), but I think it's the closest I've seen a text browser approximate a "real" browser. The support for CSS, JS, and images (depends on your terminal) is already quite impressive even if imperfect. To my knowledge it's an actual browser implementation rather than "cheating" by using an existing browser like browsh (which is still quite cool).
`chawan` is really good. I use it very often, and it looks very promising.
If you are into „browsing the web in terminal“, you should try it.
prmoustache [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Most of the features mentionned in this blog post seem really anti-user to me:
Popover seems to be a way to do popup that you can't really block. Also having content you want to hide?
PeterStuer [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How does Cloudflare handle text-based browsers? Do they immediately flag them as bots?
RockieYang [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Niche idea. It could filter out a lot of noise
noduerme [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sadly and disgustingly, I fired up lynx last night and found out that Google will not allow you to search with it anymore. I guess this change happened a few months ago and there was an HN thread about it[0], but I hadn't noticed until now.
Going to altavista still works great (even though it just redirects you to yahoo ;)
> Text-based browsers and modern HTML, no success story in sight. Given the progress we see in web technologies, the gap will only widen, so much so that w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.
This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.
People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.
Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.
ploum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’m such a Gemini fan that I’m developing a browser which try to extract content from webpages to turn them into Gemini pages ;-)
What's the difference between "let's encourage people to create gemini documents" and "let's encourage people to publish text/markdown documents on the www"?
ploum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That’s subtle but the Gemtext format is really really constrained, which forces people to do one thing: write text. Nothing else.
So, when you are on Gemini://, you know that you will only encounter linear text. You will read stuff, written by other people. It is really relaxing. I’m a huge fan of Gemini.
I would advice to start your Gemini journey by reading links on Antenna and Cosmos (which are link aggregators)
Quick question on gemini://, I have no idea what gemini:// is but I typed gemini:// on my mac and it prompted to open my iterm shell. Is this a normal behavior, I am using chrome browser.
ks2048 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's a tool called lsregister on macOS to show claimed schemes for different apps. Mine shows for iTerm2,
It is a simpler web and requires a separate browser or a plugin. It's difficult to find resources on it nowadays because of Google Gemini...
thunderbong [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Totally valid points.
By the way, only on re-reading your comment, I realised you're taking about the Gemini protocol and not the AI engine!
esseph [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hmmm
I have no idea how this would work just brainstorming.
Could you.. use some browser backend to render the page to a PDF, then an LLM to scrape the content and display it as text?
I know it wouldn't be exactly efficient, but...
worksonmine [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A more pragmatic approach would be to run the content through something like readability[0] but leaves navigation untouched. The AI could hallucinate and add content that isn't in the original, something accessibility tools don't.
I do 90% of my browsing using Offpunk (reading blogs and articles) and, suprizingly, it often works better than a graphical browser (no ads, no popup, no paywall). Of course, it doesn’t work when you really needs JS.
HN.zip
The main developer appears to tinker on the project daily and is quite nice to chat with over on libera's #edbrowse. The project does have a small, dedicated following, but I wish more people knew about it!
[0]:https://github.com/edbrowse/edbrowse
I’ve a perfect sight myself but I really like the comfort of linearity with CLI: I ask my computer something, I receive an answer.
(that’s probably why I’m developping my own CLI browser but is more graphical and less advanced than edbrowse)
In Europe most people played Earthbound (and USA only releases for SNES/MD) under emulators. That's how Nintendo put it in the Super Smash Bros roster. They say the hate emulation; but these tools cemented themselves into retroemulation like no other system, and helped to bring new sagas to the West. For free. You say you lost money because of retro-piracy? You got free marketing for physical scraps technically resting in a warehouse.
Altough nowadays I'm 100% pro libre gaming; tons of indie/FOSS philosophy overlap: FreedroidRPG, Battle for Wesnoth, Nethack/Slashem, ReTux, SuperTux2...
Back to edbrowse, it's a mail, irc and SQL client too; and you can script it, a la ed/vi, so you can do magic here.
[1] https://chawan.net/
`chawan` is really good. I use it very often, and it looks very promising.
If you are into „browsing the web in terminal“, you should try it.
Popover seems to be a way to do popup that you can't really block. Also having content you want to hide?
Going to altavista still works great (even though it just redirects you to yahoo ;)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201692
This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.
People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.
Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.
And it works Offline too by caching every request: https://offpunk.net
So, when you are on Gemini://, you know that you will only encounter linear text. You will read stuff, written by other people. It is really relaxing. I’m a huge fan of Gemini.
I would advice to start your Gemini journey by reading links on Antenna and Cosmos (which are link aggregators)
https://offpunk.net/gemini.html
It is a simpler web and requires a separate browser or a plugin. It's difficult to find resources on it nowadays because of Google Gemini...
By the way, only on re-reading your comment, I realised you're taking about the Gemini protocol and not the AI engine!
I have no idea how this would work just brainstorming.
Could you.. use some browser backend to render the page to a PDF, then an LLM to scrape the content and display it as text?
I know it wouldn't be exactly efficient, but...
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
https://offpunk.net
The whole page is still available with "view full" (or "v full")
In the current trunk, if configured, it uses ftr-site-config rules to extract content for specific websites ( https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config )
I do 90% of my browsing using Offpunk (reading blogs and articles) and, suprizingly, it often works better than a graphical browser (no ads, no popup, no paywall). Of course, it doesn’t work when you really needs JS.