Not everyone got a high speed broadband internet connection in the world. There are still so many dial-up users. Most of the modern web site developers use several multimedia contents on their web site, such as Flash animations, Real Player clips, Quick Time clips, Java applets, various effects with JavaScript, GIF animations etc. Those multimedia contents need several plug-ins to be installed in order to visit those web sites. Truly speaking, most of the multimedia contents nowadays are used for advertising purposes only. They also make the web site much more slower than a plain text based web site.
There are so many users who just want nothing but the textual contents from those web sites. They do not want those eye catching advertisements (e.g. shoot at something to win a laptop).
There is a solution to get rid of those silly advertisements. You can use a text only browser whenever you want just text only. There are a few text only browsers exist, such as Lynx and eLinks. I want to focus on eLinks in this tutorial.
Not many people use a text only web browser nowadays. Even I also don't! But sometimes, they are really helpful. The Macromedia’s home page takes about one and half minutes to load on my web browser (I have got a real slow broadband internet connection). But with eLinks, it takes only 10 to 15 seconds!
Open a Terminal window, type links or elinks (assuming that eLinks is already installed on your machine), and then press Enter. You will see the screen below:
Enter a URL in the textbox, press Enter and see the result. Press Esc key, you will get a console menu. You can even use your mouse (if console mouse service is enabled) to navigate and it also supports tabbed browsing (you can't see those tabs though). See another screen shot below:
Step-2:
The above screen shot shows the File menu of eLinks. Here are a list of some key strokes that you can use in eLinks:
To follow the current selected link, press Right arrow key.
To go back to the previous page, use Left arrow key.
To go forward, press u.
To get the URL textbox to type a new web site address, press g.
To reload the current page, use Ctrl+R keys together.
To open a new tab, press t.
Toggle between tabs, use Shift+< and Shift+> keys.
To close a tab, press c.
If you want to bookmark a web page, press a.
To open the bookmarks list, use s.
To download anything, just select the link and press d.
To search something on the page, use /.
To quit anytime from eLinks, simple press q.
These are only some basic keys for eLinks. Please consult eLinks documentation for more information. It is available at eLinks Official Website. You will be always safe while surfing the net, because eLinks will not load any external plug-ins.
