Web browsing usage from base

[Royce Williams]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 6:21 AM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Apr 2014, Eitan Adler wrote:
>
>  On 2 April 2014 09:02, Brian Kim <briansan24 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Would anyone like to share their best approach to browsing the web only
>>> using utilities from a base install?
>>>
>>
>> $pkg install firefox
>> $firefox
>>
>> seems to work (provided X is running).
>>
>
> fetch(1) was already mentioned.  telnet(1) or nc(1) would allow
> interactive use, admittedly not conveniently (level: neckbeard).  I can
> imagine a (terrible) text browser hacked together with fetch, sh, dialog,
> and grep/sed/awk to parse out links.  But even full text browsers like
> lynx, links, and w3m are often useless due to the modern web's dependence
> on images, Javascript, and such.
>
> Incidentally, the issue of the base OS not having a text web browser has
> come up several times lately.  I don't know if there's one suitable for
> import, but it's something to consider.  Writing one using only the tools
> from base would be an interesting/horrifying experiment.
>

It would also be useful to hear more about the use cases that are causing
this spike in interest.

Royce