When you want to browse the web, chances are you’re using Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer. Those are the heaviest hitters in the browser world currently. They all do pretty much the same things at this point, though each offers unique perks.
There are of course lots of lesser known smaller, niche browsers that all have different histories. Many of them are used by people who became comfortable with them and don’t see the need to use anything else. Back in college I used K-Meleon a lot. I knew a professor who really preferred SeaMonkey. When I was using linux more heavily, I had a broader library of browsers like Chromium, Konqueror and Epiphany.
For the most part, even the smaller browsers I listed function almost identically to the more mainstream ones. Each browser tends to use one of the major rendering engines like WebKit (used by Safari, Chrome, etc), Gecko (used by Firefox) or Trident (used by Internet Explorer). Even if you’d never used one of the browsers I listed, chances are you’d be able to pick it up pretty quickly.
There’s one very important browser I’ve left out though. One you probably haven’t heard of. It’s called Lynx. Originally created and released in 1992, it’s a completely text-based browser that can run on just about anything. I use it a lot when I’m ssh’d into servers. Sometimes I just want a secure browser on a machine I don’t trust. I can open up a terminal window, ssh into my server, fire up Lynx and browse away securely.
Lynx converts all webpages to plain text. So you can’t view videos or listen to audio. It also doesn’t support javascript. It’s a very different web experience, but I’ve found it to be completely capable. I can read blogs, view and participate in Reddit threads, read over forums, etc. It’s more than enough to meet my needs. It also colors text so it’s very easy to see what’s a link and what isn’t. It has a variety of color and background color schemes to denote italics, bold, lists, etc.
Here’s google.com on Lynx:
Because everything is converted to plain text, Lynx can be an excellent browser for visually impaired users since it can easily be hooked into screen readers or refreshable braille displays. This was actually how I found out about it in the first place. As a web developer, I need to try to make sites as accessible as possible. Viewing a page in Lynx can help show you what important content won’t be displayed properly. Having alt tags on images for example will allow a text-browser like Lynx to read out a description of the image it can’t display.
Here’s smalldog.com on Lynx:
If you want to give Lynx a try, the easiest way is by using a standalone OS X app called Lynxlet. Though Lynx can be used on virtually any system if you compile it from source.