Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Text Web Browser for Windows 10 - Surf the web in text only

Update 2020: Get https://metadataconsulting.blogspot.com/2020/04/How-to-get-a-Text-Browser-for-Windows-7-10-Surf-the-web-in-text-only-no-ads.html - Installation has been simplified. Below is out of date.

Get a working Text Browser for Windows 10 +:

  • Emacs is a well know editor that comes with little know built-in browser 
  • Emacs is superbly supported on all platforms, a staple on UNIX

The Emacs Web Browser (Eww) is a very basic and fast text/image browser. Flash and Javascript are not supported which gets rid of ads. 

  • A note about Lynx browser, tried install but could not get it to work. 

Emacs Web Browser surfing http://www.google.ca/
Source:

Get latest version GNU EMACS 26.0.90 for Windows

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/

How to get EMACS Web Browser to work



  1. Unzip emacs-26.0.90-x86_64-with-deps.zip - Depends library
  2. Unzip emacs-26.0.90-x86_64.zip - Compiled Emacs editor with browser
  3. Copy Compiled(2) sub-directories to Depends(1) sub-directories;
        bin -> bin
        lib -> lib
        libexe -> libexe
        share -> share - you can say NO to copy overwriting info and man directories.
  4. Run EMACS by clicking runemacs.exe in Depends bin directory

  5. In EMACS, choose Tools -> Browse the Web -> Enter your URL or Keywords:



        
  6. Voila! it works!


Tips:

  1. EWW, the Emacs Web Wowser, is a web browser package for Emacs.
  2. Download is huge at 716Mb combined, but running takes a scant 45 Mb of RAM. Unlike Google Chrome taking now a whopping 1.2Gb of RAM now !
  3. If you just use emacs-26.0.90-x86_64.zip it will complain about not loading LIBXML2.dll.
  4. You can download that here http://xmlsoft.org/sources/win32/, but then complains about gnutls not being installed, then we are into dependency hell. Hours later....

1 comment: