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No free web browsers for Linux?No free web browsers for Linux?Posted Apr 2, 2008 16:58 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: No free web browsers for Linux? by adj Parent article: WebKit rising Whether a text-only browser counts as "usable" is clearly a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of people didn't see it that way. And "free" clearly meant "free as in free software." Perhaps the sentence should have said "free graphical web browsers".
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No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 2, 2008 17:52 UTC (Wed) by adj (subscriber, #7401) [Link] Whether a text-only browser counts as "usable" is clearly a matter of opinion. Certainly a lot of people didn't see it that way. Different people will certainly give different answers to the usability question. (Interesting line of inquiry springs to mind: "How does one objectively measure 'usability'?") To the best of my recollection, about the only common content of the day that lynx couldn't cope with was server-side imagemaps. Oh, and those obnoxious <frame> things that Netscape had just inflicted on us. It obviously wasn't the best tool for viewing picture galleries, but most of the actual content out there on the web was rendered acceptably. That great directory of things on the web, yahoo, was easily browsed with lynx. What more could one want? Perhaps the sentence should have said "free graphical web browsers". Well, it does run in an xterm. *ducks*
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 2, 2008 19:50 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] w3m is a textual browser with inline image support (in xterms) :)
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 2, 2008 20:13 UTC (Wed) by adj (subscriber, #7401) [Link] w3m is a textual browser with inline image support (in xterms) :) w3m dates to 2001 (based on the ChangeLog file in the w3m 0.5.1 source distribution). This is, I think, well after "once upon a time." That said, I do quite like w3m. I generally prefer it to lynx when browsing from the machine at home while at the office. links works quite well, too. And it does have a very lightweight graphical mode if that's your thing.
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 2, 2008 20:53 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (guest, #49641) [Link] lynx has imagemap support, it just lists the links and you can choose where to go from there. Just not serverside image maps (as you can't click on the image).
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted May 8, 2008 20:33 UTC (Thu) by JohnNilsson (subscriber, #41242) [Link] "How does one objectively measure 'usability'?" Usability: "the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use" (ISO 9241-11) So a first stop should probably be to specify the users, goals and context.
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 3, 2008 1:31 UTC (Thu) by bajw (subscriber, #11712) [Link] You mean "usable" as in Shockwave Flash, animated GIFs, and other such user-hostile commercial advertising delivery mechanisms that the <blink>graphical</blink> web is used for? These modern usability features are what I need to turn off to make the web usable for me. Maybe I'm just old... </rant>
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 3, 2008 1:54 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] No, I didn't mean that at all. Where did that all come from?Like many people, I didn't make much use of the web before Mosaic came out. It just didn't seem worth the trouble of moving past gopher, which is where all the really cool stuff was. I hope you'll agree that LWN understands the value of text, but there is a lot to be said for moving beyond curses for the user interface too. So, for many (probably most) people, Netscape was the only usable web browser on Linux for quite a few years. It seems a little weird that this point of view requires defending.
No free web browsers for Linux? Posted Apr 3, 2008 6:21 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link] Mosaic has been mentioned, but there was also mMosaic. Sun had a great GUI browser for Linux in which all windows existed inside the main browser panel. It even came with its own webserver. It resembled early Opera alarmingly. Gopher was great, but never WAIS time on just one technology available for the Archie-tecture. Probably the most creative GUI brwsers to be found operated via LambdaMOO - the Emacs of the gaming world at the time.
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