Lynx (web browser)

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Infobox Software2 Lynx is a text-only Web browser and Internet Gopher client for use on cursor-addressable, character cell terminals.

Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support SSL and many HTML features. Tables are linearized (scrunched together one cell after another without tabular structure), while frames are identified by name and can be explored as if they were separate pages.

Lynx is a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas, and was initially developed in 1992 by a team of students at the university (Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac) as a hypertext browser used solely to distribute campus information as part of a Campus-Wide Information Server. In 1993 Montulli added an Internet interface and released a new version (2.0) of the browser [1] [2] [3].

Garrett Blythe created DosLynx and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Foteos Macrides ported much of Lynx to VMS and maintained it for a time. In 1995, Lynx was released under the GNU General Public License, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers.

Lynx was originally designed for Unix and VMS and remains the most popular console browser on GNU/Linux. Versions are also available for DOS, and recent versions run on all Microsoft Windows releases. There is also a Macintosh version called MacLynx "for System 7 and later", but it is not regularly updated.

Because of its text-to-speech-friendly interface, Lynx was once popular with visually-impaired users, but better screen readers have reduced the appeal of this application. It is still included in a number of Linux distributions.

Its primary competitors are the web browsers Links (with variants Links2 and ELinks) and w3m.

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