Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Using text-only web browser Lynx to visit some of today’s top websites

lynx

Do you use Lynx? If so, you’re one of a rather small minority that use the text-only web browser, which predates even the world wide web. Although it is still perfectly usable for most websites, the lack of graphics makes Lynx less than desirable for most users today.

But our curiosity got the better of us, and we wanted to find out how useful Lynx would be to browse some of today’s top websites. This is the sort of exercise that gives you a warm geeky feeling inside.

Google

google in lynx

Out of the sites we tested Google.com is the most functional. The homepage fits in a regular 80×24 character terminal screen, and you can type in what you want to find and search for it.

The search results could perhaps be presented in a bit better way, but nonetheless, the site is perfectly usable with Lynx.

Apple

Apple.com with Lynx

You would be excused for thinking that the image and video heavy Apple.com site would be useless with Lynx, but, surprise, you’d be wrong. Looking at the specifications, for example, of its latest MacBook Pro is no problem. Now, when it comes to shopping online with Lynx, that’s a whole other ballgame (hint: don’t bother trying).

Facebook

facebook in lynx

Right when you arrive at Facebook’s homepage it tells you “You’re using a web browser we don’t support.” That’s at least honest and upfront. But that’s as far as you go as you can’t log in.

New York Times

nytimes in lynx

We decided to throw in New York Times in our test to see how it fared with Lynx. The answer is not too badly. Reading articles with Lynx works okay, but the pages become very long, with the menus especially taking up a lot of space.

Tumblr

tumblr in lynx

Tumblr is a site clearly not built for Lynx users as you can’t log in. To be fair, using a text-only browser for Tumblr may not be the brightest idea ever. But it would be nice to be able to log in to your account and post an update, at least.

Twitter

twitter in lynx

Twitter warns that its site “makes heavy use of JavaScript,” but that shouldn’t deter potential Lynx users. Or should it? We couldn’t figure out how to post a new tweet, nor did we get replying worked out. The best you can hope for then is catching up with your Twitter stream then.

CNN

CNN in Lynx

Scanning the latest headlines on the CNN.com homepage works pretty well with Lynx. But if you want to browse around and read articles, be prepared to scroll past a lot of stuff at the beginning of each page before you get to the actual content.

Pinterest

pinterest in lynx

Yes, we saved the worst until now, because, if you can’t see any pictures, what’s the point of visiting Pinterest? Login doesn’t seem to work, but that’s a moot point anyway, given the purpose of the site.

Wikipedia

wikipedia in lynx

Although we wouldn’t call browsing around on Wikipedia with Lynx a pleasant experience, necessarily, it works. That’s perhaps not surprising given that it’s primarily a text-based site.

Amazon

Amazon.com with Lynx

Last but in no way least in our brief survey of using some of the world’s top sites is Amazon.com. Short verdict: it works! We could search for items and even log in to our account and see purchase history, and more.

Lynx FTW

After having attacked these ten sites with Lynx, our conclusion can only be that it worked better than we had anticipated. Not all the sites are usable with Lynx, but many of them offer at least basic functionality using the text-only web browser.

Being the geeks we are, we’d almost like to shout “Lynx FTW” from the rooftops. It’s not that we’ll all switch now to Lynx as our main web browser, but it’s nice to know that a text-only browser works this well still today.

Do you know of any particularly Lynx-friendly or unfriendly sites? Share them with us in the comments.

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free