Most of you know what is web browser – it’s a program/software by which you surf the internet, can view websites and web pages, send emails etc.
Browsers we are familiar with (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, Camilla) have a good interface and are called graphical browsers because they, display all the contents of a web page including text, images, videos and flash.
What is a text web browser?
A text web browser is just like a graphical browser, lets you surf the website. One big difference is, the complete absence of a nice looking interface.You have to use keys like the tab and arrows and enter key (instead of mouse) and opening a website shows you only text matter – no images not any other flash media and colours 🙂
It displays only the text on a web site with only links.
Importance and use of text web browser
A text web browsers is a very good way to check how a search engine bot views/reads your website page content. These service also available for free on the web, If you don’t want to download and install a text based web browser on your computer.
Which one is good in text browser?
Lynx was the first text based web browser and is good till now. It is a free program that can be installed on multiple operating systems (its cross-platform) including Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux. There are several other such programs like Emacs/W3, Edbrowser, ELinks, W3M. Lynx has been around since about 1992 and can be downloaded from Lynx homepage.
Google has been the most popular search engine and people always strive hard to have their sites rank high on its search results pages. To help developers with the various aspects of their web sites, Google has posted tons of articles and videos. They’ve also put up a Webmasters Tools section which has many utilities that can assist people in improving their web sites. One of them is the “Fetch as Googlebot” located under “Diagnostics” through which you can check how individual page appear to Google’s crawler.
“Fetch as Googlebot” is not a text browser :). However, it’s a great tool that can inform problems/bugs with in your site. Webmaster Tools site is free and you only need a free Google Account to access all of its features.
