rendering the same page Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support
SSL and many
HTML features. Tables are formatted using spaces, while frames are identified by name and can be explored as if they were separate pages. Lynx is not inherently able to display various types of non-text content on the web, such as images and video, but it can launch external programs to handle it, such as an image viewer or a video player. Unlike most web browsers, Lynx does not support
JavaScript, which many websites require to work correctly. The speed benefits of text-only browsing are most apparent when using low bandwidth internet connections, or older computer hardware that may be slow to render image-heavy content.
Privacy Because Lynx does not support graphics,
web bugs that track user information are not fetched, meaning that web pages can be read without the privacy concerns of graphic web browsers. However, Lynx does support
HTTP cookies, which can also be used to track user information. Lynx therefore supports cookie
whitelisting and
blacklisting, or alternatively cookie support can be disabled permanently. As with conventional browsers, Lynx also supports browsing histories and page caching, both of which can raise privacy concerns.
Configurability Lynx supports both command-line options and configuration files. There are 142 command-line options according to its help message. The template configuration file lynx.cfg lists 233 configurable features. There is some overlap between the two approaches to configuration, although there are command-line options such as -restrict which are not matched in lynx.cfg. In addition to pre-set options by command-line and configuration file, Lynx's behavior can be adjusted at runtime using its options menu. Again, there is some overlap between the settings. Lynx implements many of these runtime optional features, optionally (controlled through a setting in the configuration file) allowing the choices to be saved to a separate writable configuration file. The reason for restricting the options which can be saved originated in a usage of Lynx which was more common in the mid-1990s, i.e., using Lynx itself as a front-end application to the Internet accessed by dial-in connections.
Accessibility Because Lynx is a text-based browser, it can be used for internet access by visually impaired users on a
refreshable braille display and is easily compatible with
text-to-speech software. As Lynx substitutes images, frames and other non-textual content with the text from alt, name and title
HTML attributes and allows hiding the
user interface elements, the browser becomes specifically suitable for use with cost-effective general purpose screen reading software. A version of Lynx specifically enhanced for use with screen readers on
Windows was developed at
Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Remote access Lynx is also useful for accessing websites from a remotely connected system in which no graphical display is available. Despite its text-only nature and age, it can still be used to effectively browse much of the modern web, including performing interactive tasks such as editing
Wikipedia.
Web design and robots Since Lynx will take keystrokes from a text file, it is still very useful for automated data entry, web page navigation, and
web scraping. Consequently, Lynx is used in some web crawlers. Web designers may use Lynx to determine the way in which search engines and web crawlers see the sites that they develop. Online services that provide Lynx's view of a given web page are available. Lynx is also used to test websites' performance. As one can run the browser from different locations over remote access technologies like
Telnet and
SSH, one can use Lynx to test the website's connection performance from different geographical locations simultaneously. Another possible web design application of the browser is quick checking of the site's links. ==Supported platforms==