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 …

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 03:55 GMT Quxy

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.

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1. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 08:58 GMT Thecowking
  
  Re: Retro?
  
  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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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 04:01 GMT jake

Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.

I still use Lynx regularly ... 99.99%+ of everything useful online is text.

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2. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 05:45 GMT Evil Auditor
  
  Re: Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.
  
  But but... what about cats' videos?
  
  Oh, useful you said.
  
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  1. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 08:23 GMT WraithCadmus
    
    Re: Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.
    
    A Lynx is a cat, surely that's close enough?
    
    I do use Lynx from time to time, usually to obfuscate sites I need to quickly pop on and check when I should be working.
    
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3. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 06:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.
  
  "I still use Lynx regularly ... 99.99%+ of everything useful online is text."
  
  You're so predictable, jake :)
  
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4. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 09:05 GMT RAMChYLD
  
  Re: Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.
  
  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).
  
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  1. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 20:50 GMT keithpeter
    
    Re: Text is considered "retro"? That's sad.
    
    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.
    
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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 04:18 GMT Chris Gray 1

Another oldy here

"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.

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 05:17 GMT Awil Onmearse

Nothing wrong with text.

Somehow "A picture paints a thousand words" got hijacked into being "A picture requires a thousand lines of buggy javascript and a thousand lines of retarded CSS in order to position a box on a fucking page".

Whaddya mean "penis-enlargement ads actually deliver?"

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1. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 09:28 GMT Crisp
  
  Hey! Don't knock the CSS box model!
  
  Seriously! Don't! It will probably fall over if you do!
  
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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 05:45 GMT Tommy Pock

ah, man

That green-on-black gave my eyes such a rest. I could sit and read the phonebook on a screen like that.

I'm going to find a CBM PET for sale, I'm done with all of this modern crap

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 06:03 GMT AndraÅ¾ 'ruskie' Levstik

Don't forget you have alpine as well - which unlike pine is still being actively developed. And frankly I know more people using mutt and alpine than I know people using thunderbird or even shudder outlook.

Know enough people that use elinks/w3m/lynx/links etc... to browse the web as well.

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 09:16 GMT spider from mars

Pine

I used Pine up until about 2005, when the company I worked for finally blocked outgoing ssh connections..

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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 14:32 GMT PJI

MH

Nobody use MH? Most flexible and excellent. You could almost automate making tea in response to a distribution list email.

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1. Wednesday 2nd October 2013 18:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: MH
  
  > You could almost automate making tea in response to a distribution list email.
  
  Can see a different type of DoS attack coming.
  
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2. Thursday 3rd October 2013 18:28 GMT Michael Wojcik
  
  Re: MH
  
  I used MH for a little while, circa 1990 if memory serves. It was OK, but for the few things I used it for, it didn't have much advantage over home-grown scripts scraping the mail directory, or hacking sendmail.cf to send particular messages directly to scripts.
  
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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 14:51 GMT lozhurst

Text mode browsers essential for webdev

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.

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Thursday 3rd October 2013 08:33 GMT Down not across

"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.

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1. Thursday 3rd October 2013 09:33 GMT Nearly Anonymous
  
  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.
  
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