Lynx being used on Mac OS X

Lynx is a text-only web browser 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 originally developed by Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac. Garrett Blythe created DosLynx and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Foteos Macrides ported much of Lynx to VMS and was maintaining it for a while. In 1995, Lynx was released under the GPL 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. Recent versions also run on Microsoft Windows. There is also a Macintosh version called MacLynx "for System 7 and later," though 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 Lynx to the blind.

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

There were reports in early 2005 of somebody supposedly being put in jail for using Lynx to access a tsunami relief donation site, because a system administrator at British Telecom interpreted the "nonstandard" user agent in the logs as a hacking attempt.

References

See also

• Computer accessibility
• List of web browsers
• Comparison of web browsers

External links

• Lynx homepage
• Michael Grobe's personal recollections of Lynx development
• Extremely Lynx resource page
• MacLynx
• Lynx for Windows installer