Re: reporter from The Economist in Thailand seeks help / new Tor guide is up

[George Shaffer <George.Shaffer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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