Terminal text web browsers

lynx is a text web browser that allows browsing certain websites without need for a graphical display. Several other text-based web browsers for Terminal are available, and while they offer some measure of increased security due to their lacking JavaScript or easily disabling JS, there have been CVEs for these web browsers as well. With this type of browser using a custom engine, the web-browsing data bandwidth can be dramatically less than with general graphical web browsers as the graphics and JavaScript might simply be ignored and not downloaded. This orders of magnitude reduction in data usage can be useful for those with limited data plans or slow connections. This can be useful at remote arctic sites or on a satellite connection.

However, the lack of a general web browser backend engine like Chrome or Firefox can lead to many websites not rendering properly or at all. An alternative approach is to render the website remotely and send only rendered text over a secure connection like SSH. This achieves dramatic data bandwidth reduction to the remote site by rendering at a server with a normal full internet connection. An implementation of this approach using a headless Mozilla Firefox is browsh. Browsh keybindings or mouse can be used to browse the web in the Terminal. On Windows, Browsh can be installed by winget:

winget install browsh.browsh