[BRLTTY] Is there a feature-compatible text-based browser

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi list,

On 2025-09-16 at 19:41 -0400, <kperry at blinksoft.com> wrote:
 > Recently I even made two test versions using different automation sweets
 > and chromium back end for chrom.

I would stay away from Google browsers for security reasons, but I don't know
if Firefox is any better in reality. Web safety requires disabling JavaScript
which then defeats the whole purpose of a modern browser.

PlayWright might be a good way to interface with the browser. It allows
choosing the backe-nd browser.

 > It would use Python as a front end, and it would be configurable.

This is a good idea. I would suggest using notcurses (or something else
written in C) as a terminal access library.

I have used prompt-toolkit in a personal project and my experience is that it
is slow, even in IPython.

 > It sounds like Nickolas already has a start on a firefox one, but I am not
 > a fan of the Lynx interface. I would do it more ncurses based which would
 > make it portable and easy to configure.

I don't like Lynx either. Also I want to note that using a modern browser
through a HTTP proxy is going to be very challenging if one wants to use any
form of dynamic pages, especially SPAs (Single page applications).
Unfortunately web is nowadays full of SPAs written using different JS
libraries. These absolutely require dynamic rendering of the page contents. I
wonder how Lynx could send single key events to pages and rerender them as the
page contents change based on input events.

-- 
Aura