Text never looked so good
A bit of Lynx history, first. It was developed in the University of Kansas' Distributed Computing Group, as a hypertext browser for use on campus. That was in 1992, the year of Windows 3.1. In 1995 Lynx came under GPL license. In 2006 the last stable release was let out of its cage, but development continues.
If anything, Lynx was massively ahead of its time, solving problems that could only have been predicted by the art of witchcraft. So now, in 2008, it is time for Lynx to pounce.
Feature breakdown
Let us compare the features of some of the better known browsers and Lynx.
| Lynx | Chrome | Firefox | Opera | Internet Explorer | |
| CSS support | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Image support | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Popup blocker | What's a popup? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Flash player | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| JavaScript | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rickroll protection | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Runs without a window manager | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Anti-web-2.0 defences | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Works on a VT100 | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Tabbed browsing | You can only read one web page at a time, foo' | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
While the 'other' browsers went and pandered to crazes such as supporting 'images', 'Flash' and 'JavaScript', Lynx focused on what people really need.
Worried about getting Rickrolled? No chance with Lynx. Fed up of LOLcats? Lynx is the answer. Want to protect yourself from the web 2.0 infection? You know what to do.
When the world at large realises the features Lynx brings to the table... oh boy! It is going to kick off big time.
Performance analysis
It would be unfair of us to compare loading times of browsers that need to render things such as images and other non-essential page elements, to the mighty text-only Lynx.
Instead, we're going to look at something equally unfair... memory footprint.
We tested a Lynx 2.8.6rel5 build on Windows XP x64 against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet explorer, to see just how much memory each one needed to render the HEXUS.net front page. Here are our findings (Lynx compatible, of course)...
Browser memory footprint - viewing www.hexus.net
100M|
| ___
80M| | | ___
| | | | |
60M| | | | | ___ ___
| | | | | | | | |
40M| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
20M| | | | | | | | |
| ___ | | | | | | | |
0 |____|_|_____|_|_____|_|_____|_|_____|_|____
Lynx Chrome Firefox Opera IE8
Lynx is nearly 10 times lighter in footprint than any other browser on test. Incredible efficiency there.
Conclusions
Move over Google, Chrome is the least of the web's worries. Now it's really time for the browser market to tremble, as Lynx will surely become the browser of choice for those who've seen one too many 'funny smilies' adverts, endured more bad YouTube videos than they can bear, and are fed up of pictures of people in MySpace poses.
So just about everyone, then? Yeah, we reckon.
Do yourself a favour. Upgrade to Lynx now.
