Hi there!

I've known for some time about these, but only today tried one. It's ELinks (http://elinks.or.cz/) and I must say I find it awesome! :cool:
It's minimalistic, looks good and does everything I need for casual forum browsing, etc. I know there is also Lynx and Links, but ELinks seems to be most feature rich.

From their about page (http://elinks.or.cz/about.html):

ELinks is a program for browsing the web in text mode. The goal of the project has from the beginning been to provide a feature-rich text mode browser with an open patches/features inclusion policy and active development. One of these features is that ELinks includes Links-Lua which adds scripting capabilities to ELinks.

Below the most noteworthy features are listed.

* Lots of protocols (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6)
* Authentication (HTTP authentication, Proxy authentication)
* Persistent cookies
* Cute menus and dialogs
* Tabbed browsing
* Support for browser scripting
* Tables and frames rendering
* Colors
* Background (non-blocking) downloads


Here are a few screenshots of Sciforums in ELinks:
http://piparmetra.net/ftp/elinks1.jpg
http://piparmetra.net/ftp/elinks2.jpg
http://piparmetra.net/ftp/elinks3.jpg
http://piparmetra.net/ftp/elinks4.jpg

I must say I find it most aesthetically pleasing and certainly enjoy browsing with it. Oh and yes, no banners at all.

What's your experience with text-only browsers?
For what tasks do you use them?
Anything other you want to say about them?


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Screenshots taken from an Eterm terminal window in Linux Mandrake

Interesting. I wonder if this would speed up our poor dial-up brothers and sisters browsing? You'd still have to open up the other browser from time to time. Images are a necessity at times.

1. Yes, one of the benefits is that text-only browsers load webpages lightning fast. Or at least faster than other browsers, because they show (and download) only text, no backgrounds, no images, etc. It's pure text.
2. Of course, I know that I need to use other browsers. For example, I seriously doubt that my internet bank supports Elinks or any other text only browser (they have those sliding menus (dhtml maybe)). Anyways, I use Firefox and it does the job, but from now on I think I'll use Elinks for such things as foruming, news reading, etc. Usual daily things that don't need images or flash.

p.s. I'm posting from Elinks atm.

Theres an X version of elinks, so you can display images and click. Its very fast too. The only time I ever really use links is over ssh, since firefox is everything I want in a browser

Dillo is another fast one.

For windows, k-meleon is the most minimalistic and fast. But like Dillo, it can have problems rendering a few things

You can install ELinks on windows as well, if you have http://www.cygwin.com/ installed. At least I think that in theory you should be able to, I haven't tried that myself though (no windows).

Text-mode browsers come in handy at times, like when X won't start for whatever reason, or if you're using old hardware or a small device, and elinks is probably the best.
And actually, elinks is not much faster than my regular Firefox profile. I also have a speedy Firefox profile which has a number of extra speed tweaks such as using a cache located in RAM ;) which is actually faster than elinks.

Nice tip about the cache in RAM, I'll try that out. :)
Speed howerver is not really a problem for my adsl when it concerns webbrowsing.
I simply like the minimalistic text-only look.

Well you can disable images in Firefox too. And you can force it to use your own style sheets for colours, etc., if you want to change them too.
:p

Too much work. :) I'm a professional slacker.