Lynx Portable

Lynx Portable is a web browser intended for use on cursor-addressable terminals and sports a text-only approach to navigating the web. The nature of the browser makes it fit for old computers and / or for Internet connections of low bandwidth.

Lynx’s development started off in 1992 and is an on-going project in the present day. It is the oldest navigator still in use, sporting a console-based interface and an extremely low footprint on system resources.

Lynx Portable was designed as a replica of the original Lynx and is packaged by a different company than the producing one. It is signed by PortableApps and provides an out-of-the-box package that can be run from a removable drive, as opposed to the original product that requires advanced configurations.

Lynx Portable is a less conventional browser that can be manipulated from a console window. The contents of a web address is displayed as text, except images and videos, which cannot be loaded natively. Nonetheless, it can be instructed to launch various third-party programs to handle this type of data.

Some of the pages embedded inside a URL may appear numbered and are navigable by arrow keys. If frames are present, the browser identifies them by name and enables you to examine them in the same way that you do with a normal page.

Having a text-only principle at the core, Lynx is nothing like a modern browser, neither in appearance nor functionality wise. Moreover, lack of support for Flash and JavaScript (as present in other navigators) might impair it from displaying correctly websites that are heavily based on either one of these technologies.

Due to its nature, Lynx Portable may not seem like much, but there’s surely more to it than meets the eye. Modern navigators may provide more user-oriented browsing environments, but aren’t even close to Lynx’s performance in terms of bandwidth usage.