Lynx (web browser)

Lynx is a highly configurable text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals.As of 2015, it is the oldest web browser currently in general use and development, having started in 1992.

History

Lynx was a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of the University of Kansas, and was initially developed in 1992 by a team of students at the university (Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac) as a hypertext browser used solely to distribute campus information as part of a Campus-Wide Information Server and for browsing the Gopher space. Beta availability was announced to Usenet on 22 July 1992. In 1993, Montulli added an Internet interface and released a new version (2.0) of the browser.

As of July 2007 the support of communication protocols in Lynx is implemented using a version of libwww,forked from the library's code base in 1996. The supported protocols include Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NNTP and WAIS. Support for NNTP was added to libwww from ongoing Lynx development in 1994. Support for HTTPS was added to Lynx's fork of libwww later, initially as patches due to concerns about encryption.