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surf a slow internet connection like a boss
Lifehacker.com recently published an article on how and why you should set up a secondary browser for slower connections. The article starts with the premise that, these days, you are often on your laptop, but are connected to a slow connection, whether it be via badly configured wifi, overloaded wifi, or tethered to a 3G connection. Lifehacker suggests that rather than optimising your browser for a slow connection when this happens, you should have a secondary browser set up and ready for such situations. A damn good idea, I must say. However, then they go on to set out how to set up Opera for efficient slow speed browsing. However, they fail to mention the obvious choice in such situations – lynx. Lynx is, by definition, already optimised for slow connections – no mucking round – just download and go.
what is lynx?
Lynx is a text only browser developed by the University of Kansas, and is often used by the visually impaired, as its text only focus makes it easy to run the output through a text to speech application. Lynx is fast because it strips out all graphical elements and only displays text. Why, you may ask, would you want a browser that does not display images or videos? Well, I would retort, because you’re on a slow-ass connection, and in those situations, you are most often forced into a situation of surfing for essentials, and therefore text should be sufficient for most purposes. You can wait until you get home to catch up on the latest lolcats videos. Lynx is perfect for that.
lynx is cross-platform
Lynx works on Windows, Mac, Linux and most other unix-like operating systems. You can download it from here. It is, of course, free.
using lynx like a boss
If after using Lynx for a while, you fall in love with it, how about using it to play youtube videos in ascii – check out this page for a howto on that. If you like the idea of playing videos in ascii art in general, check out this howto.
Another browser tool which is indispensable for slow connections is wget. To download something, rather than ‘Save Link As’, you do ‘Copy Link Location’, then, in a terminal window, ‘wget ‘. Then you get back to browsing while wget chugs away in the background fetching in that file.
Some sites are prone to drop connections when the transfer slows down (and dialup is prone to slow down for things you don’t see, such as your package manager fetching in listings from the repos). Browsers like Firefox will stop trying when that happens; wget will retry the fetch, picking up where it left off until the file is completely in or the retry count is exhausted. You can even halt the fetch with ^C to free up the connection, then redo the command later, putting a ‘-c’ between ‘wget’ and the file’s URL, and wget will pick up where it left off, fetching in only the part which it hasn’t got yet.
Also, browsers are prone to stumble and freeze when there’s a file fetch going on as well as a new page to browse. With wget doing the fetching, the browser is a lot quicker in moving from page to page because it isn’t timeslicing between the two tasks.