To The 57 Lynx Users Last Month

Lynx Welcome!

Just going through various stats on my blog today and noticed that last month, there were 57 visits to this site using Lynx.

Lynx?

Are you serious?

Does looking at this site via Lynx make my ass look big?

Lynx, for the unitiated, is a text based browser designed to allow mainframes to present a browsing tool to its users. It is the first web browser I ever used back in college. You ain’t ever navigated the web till you’ve done it in a text browser.

So to you Lynx users, I should mention that we now have these newfangled 32-bit processors that are capable of running browsers that can render and format text and images. They’re really a hoot!

All kidding aside, my understanding is that people still use Lynx for accessibility reasons. For example, blind people can have the site read to them with a Stephen Hawking like voice. That’s pretty sweet.

Comments

7 responses

Scott Williams • November 17th, 2005
Might some web crawlers be identifying themselves as lynx? Or using it as a code base of some sort?

One site I frequent reported that they get about 75 views a month from a browser built for the Sega Dreamcast.

Barry Dorrans • November 17th, 2005
I guess it's time to fire up fiddler and send some more interesting agent strings.

Look ma, IE 0.9 beta

baus • November 17th, 2005
I sometimes still use Lynx when I want to browse docs or download something to a remote server. It is one of the tools I have installed on all my Linux servers.

Oddly the use of CSS has made Lynx work better rather than worse. HTML has become less complicated and a lot of the difficult rendering problems are pushed into CSS.

Kieran Jacobsen • November 18th, 2005
Students often us lynx as its often an easy way to get free internet on campus. Just telnet or ssh into some random public access server on campus that has access to the internet and your away. ITs definielty better than paying for the traffic.

ThaNerd • November 26th, 2005
As a blog-spam fighter, i often came accross very strange useragent strings... While not having any PDF or Real-media content, i've been visited by Acrobat, RealPlayer and various others...

However, my stats say 48.7% of my audience use IE in various versions (44.8% of total is IE6.0) and 17.5% of my visitors use Firefox, but only 5.8% use firefox version 1.0.4, and 0.xxx% use the latest version.

An amazing thing, that gives an idea of the fact those useragent strings are often faked : 0.8% of FireFox users have no identifyable version number!

Pete Mounce • November 28th, 2005
I use elinks (lynx alternative) to browse websites over ssh from work, where work might not otherwise allow those sites through the proxy.

you've been HAACKED • July 1st, 2007
Bank Error In My Favor. I'm a Microsoft MVP