Retro?
What is so "retro" about a text-mode HTML browser?
I use Elinks on a daily basis (even with X, graphical browsers suck at the other end of a 50ms link) and find it an indispensible tool.
The history-conscious chaps at CERN have wound back the clock to 1992 by releasing a “line-mode browser” emulator. Reg readers doubtless recall that the first web browsers were text-only affairs, until a young fellow called Marc Andreessen had the bright idea that lots more people could be interested by the World Wide Web if …
Quite, this reply is written in elinks, which I use just about every day.
I actually prefer the lack of adverts, (most) photos and videos distracting from the content of the sites I read.
Though for LOHAN articles, of course I open Firefox for the full experience, if you know what I mean.
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Lynx? First text-based browser I've ever used (downloaded the MS-DOS version back when I was performance crazy and made my Pentium-166 run MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 because it booted up exponentially faster than Windows 95. That was before I discovered the wonderful world of Linux and it's distros).
Lynx was the first Web browser I used as well, but that was via a Unix box in London (business rate modem dialup!). I had a VT100 session on my Acorn A3000. Then we got a TCP/IP stack and a graphical Web browser (that could save the entire rendered page as a !Draw file). Fun times.
"Pine" is retro? I use it for reading email, and sending anything with an attachment. If I send something without an attachment, I use /bin/mail. Way faster than messing around with a mouse and a GUI thing. When I got this system, I tried switching to a GUI email client to go "modern", but it wouldn't let me use an external editor (emacsclient), so I quickly reverted to the tools that work for me.
Any web developer worth their salt and working on public facing sites makes sure it renders sensibly in a text-mode browser, since that's how most screen readers see the web. Not only do we want to make our websites accessible for the differently-abled, we often have a legal obligation to.
"They do, however, make your correspondent wonder if it's time to bring back the Pine and Elm mailreaders..."
What do you mean bring back?
That infers that one would've moved away from them. Ok pine could be replaced with alpine if you need something that is actively worked on. And no mention of mutt. Tssk.
Development on both Pine and Alpine have officially stopped; so from that perspective, the author is correct in wanting to bring back Pine. However, they are succeeded by Realpine. UW did not want to fund further development, so it was off-loaded to be entirely volunteer maintained though not much actual progress. I'm hoping it gains better integration with g/pgp.