w3m: This is not an April Fools joke

Look closely at these two screenshots. Very closely.

 

That’s it. Move in closer. Closer. Now, what’s wrong with those pictures? I’ll tell you: There are thumbnail images injected into the text page.

And just to be clear, that is this machine running without X, in a strictly framebuffer environment.

What fresh hell is this?! 👿 Who approved such an abomination? What’s next, dogs and cats living together? Blasphemy!

And I know what you’re thinking right now: This must be some kind of April Fools joke. No, no joke. The world has truly gone mad.

Yes and no. That’s strictly business as usual for w3m. Or rather, the Arch version of w3m, which incorporates tweaks to splice images into pages.

w3m is no joke; I’ve been back and forth between that and elinks more than once in my short time as a Linux enthusiast.

But I won’t dwell too long on it. Mostly because a couple years ago I put together a longer and more detailed analysis, along with some competition.

And really, while the images are kind of cute, I miss fun stuff from elinks that w3m doesn’t seem to have yet. Or maybe I’ve just never looked deep enough. … 😐

Give it a shot though. It renders fast enough and without undue stress at 500Mhz against a Rage Mobility video card. What it can do at slower speeds is open to interpretation. 😉