elinks: The browser we both probably know

If your local search engine is to be believed, I still haven’t mentioned elinks specifically in any of these posts.

Hard to believe, after 10 months of sifting through applications for the terminal. 🙄

 

Then again, maybe not. I’ve been an elinks fan for years — probably since I realized it had the bulk of the features I needed in a graphical browser (no, Flash playback isn’t one of them).

And I’ve picked through elinks many times, in hopes of drumming up support for it, so rehashing it’s greatness is hardly anything new.

But in short, I’ll give you these points, and you can take away from them what you will:

1. elinks is fast.
2. elinks is small (especially when compared to Firefox, the porker).
3. elinks trims out a lot of the gunk that bogs down the Web these days.
4. elinks has a tabbed interface.
5. elinks has a built-in download manager.
6. elinks can handle different file types and pass them to an appropriate application.
7. elinks has mouse support.
8. elinks handles up to 256 colors and tries to stay faithful to the original color codes.
9. elinks is menu-driven.
10. elinks will drive your geek friends into a paroxysm of jealousy.

And the last one alone should be reason enough to use it. Any time you can trigger a conniption in a geek, you should take advantage of it.

I will admit that in the realm of text-only browsers, elinks is probably the heaviest. See here for more detail. But that’s the price you pay for power, I guess.

That’s enough. Let’s move on through the list.