Web Browsers OpenFAQ

What text-based UNIX/VMS/Win32 browsers are available?

Contributors:

These are hypertext browsers for UNIX, VMS, W32, etc. systems. In many cases your system administrator will have already installed one or more of these packages; check before compiling your own copy.

The Lynx full screen browser

This is a hypertext browser for UNIX, VMS, Win32/DOS386, etc., using full screen, arrow keys, highlighting, etc. Also useful in scripts as a way to fetch the source code or a nicely formatted text version of a document on the web, Lynx is the best choice for text-based browsing in this author's opinion. More information is available at the primary Lynx distribution site: SLCC.EDU The canonical Lynx site is http://lynx.browser.org.

The w3m pager/browser

This is a hypertext pager/browser for UNIX and Windows32, using full screen, arrow keys, highlighting, etc.

According to its author, w3m has several features which Lynx doesn't:

w3m can render tables
w3m can render frames. (it converts the frames into a table)
w3m can display documents given from standard input easily
w3m is small. Binary size of w3m on Sparc workstation is under 300KByte. (version beta-990512,gcc -O2). Binary size of w3m compiled under i586 Linux 2.2.7 (SuSE 6.1) is 317k

w3m now supports gpm.

More information is available at the primary w3m distribution site: http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/

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