On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 21:46, Tim McCormack wrote: > Chris Willis wrote: > > NO browser (cept maybe a text browser in BSD or something) is really > > 100% safe on its own. Firefox has lots of vulnerabilities, just like > > IE. > . . . > I agree about the text browser -- I should really familiarize myself > with Lynx.
Continuing now OT thread: Lynx has its uses, but anyone used to modern browsers is likely to find it frustrating. Lynx is not just text only in that it does not display graphics but is text based and runs in a text window (terminal). It does not recognize tables, and most modern web pages are built in tables, allowing the standard page and navigation elements, to be arranged above or to the left of the main page content. This means as you read the source, these come before the main text content. That is how Lynx displays the page (as it is sequentially arranged in the source file) ; the main page content is usually between a screenful or more of standard items and links and more of this at the bottom. A page as simple as Google's home page takes 13 tabs or down arrows to reach the search field. Yahoo, on the other hand recognizes it has received a request from a text browser, and sends a different page where the search field is the first item on the page after "Yahoo". Lynx takes some getting used to. Lynx is not simple. It's default configuration file is 140K, but mostly explanatory comments. It has about 135 options. I don't know that you can assume it's 100% safe. If you eliminate all active content from your current browser, or install an alternate browser (e.g., Netscape, Opera) and disable all active content, and severely control cookies, wouldn't that do what Lynx is intended to do while still seeing most web pages, more or less as intended? George Shaffer
