The graphical web browser that uses 5mb of memory
No I haven't tried that, but I will. Thanks....
Brilliant to have a TLS 1.2 compliant but simple browser like Links2. Defeats much of the garbage of the modern internet. Also gets you around some paywalls, like nytimes and washingtonpost dot com(s) for instance. With simple sites like text.npr.org and lite.cnn.com and wttr.in I can complete most of my essential internet tasks without firing up abrowser these days. Starting to not like Mozilla much either.
>"Also gets you around some paywalls, like nytimes and washingtonpost dot com(s) for instance"
Yes, I noticed that - they are only able to paywall people by assuming that readers will allow their sites to run javascript in their browsers. It's pretty funny.
>"I can complete most of my essential internet tasks without firing up abrowser these days"
And if you cultivate a bunch of RSS feeds, you can actually read a ton of news sites through newsboat without ever having to touch a browser at all. Last time I was messing with newsboat, I was able to get it to track video channels as well, and notify me when a content creator I was following had uploaded a new video. It gives the video link, and then you just copy that and drop it into an mpv command, and you've got all your favorite daily youtube stuff without ever even firing up a browser.
Careful, iteroni has no https available. With so many other options available (both https and onion) I don't think it's worth the risk.
As for downloading, actually you can download in any instance.
Copy link of video, replace "watch?v=" with "latest_version?id=" and at the end add any itag you want. For example, itag=18 gives 360p with sound, while itag=22 gives 720p with sound. There are a lot of others, you might wanna check. If you want to preserve privacy, add "&local=true" at the end after the itag. You will be downloading through the Invidious instance and not directly from Youtube.
This way will work in any old computer with GNU/Linux or even FreeDOS for example. I had success with a Pentium1 playing video at 240p if you accept such a low resolution. If you only want sound, there are itags for those.
Links2 and curl are available for such old machines in both Linux and DOS variants, a simple script or macro can automate the work for you.
That's very cool. Where can you find a list of all those download tags?
Hey Andy,
Well, you can find them online. You can also learn most of them using testing on Invidious. But I will save you the trouble ;)
https://gist.github.com/sidneys/7095afe4da4ae58694d128b1034e01e2
This list seems pretty good, pretty complete. For audio I recommend 140 (it's m4a, and quality/size ratio is very good), for video I usually go with 18, but if you want HD go with 22. If you want the other formats you will have to combine them later using mkvtools.
Hope this helps!
EDIT: By combine I meant join audio and video. Youtube actually plays 2 different tracks at the same time, which means most itags will be only video or audio only. Anything else just ask, but I trust you will find your own way around from here ;)
I'm familiar with a lot of this info about combining tracks from playing around wiht youtube-dl, but I was not aware of the different tag numbers. This is super helpful, thank you very much!
Hi andy, I want to share that Dillo is a blazing fast, small web browser also.
Hi Malsasa, I have not had any luck with Dillo in years. It just won't render most web pages for me. What is your secret of success with Dillo?
Try this dillo fork:
https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG
sudo apt-get install git libfltk1.3-dev libmbedtls-dev build-essential checkinstall
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/w00fpack/dilloNG
cd dilloNG
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --enable-ssl --with-ca-certs-dir=/etc/ssl/certs
make
sudo checkinstall make install
Now you'll have a custom dillo (with newer features such as
launching mpv+youtube-dl with a right click button on the page and selecting it in the menu).
Another tip: change the User Agent in ~/.dillo/dillorc:
http_user_agent="Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)"
That will work with lots of pages which have hardcoded UA's
for legacy media.
Looks very cool, I'll give it a shot.
Also, in order to kill all pest from trackers and such:
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.base
echo "/Start StevenBlack/,$ p" | ed -s ~/src/hosts/hosts > ~/src/hosts/hosts.append
cat /etc/hosts.base ~/src/hosts/hosts.append > ~/src/hosts/hosts.new
sudo cp ~/src/hosts/hosts.new /etc/hosts
To update the hosts file for new pest blockers:
cd ~/src/hosts
git pull
echo "/Start StevenBlack/,$ p" | ed -s ~/src/hosts/hosts >
~/src/hosts/hosts.append
cat /etc/hosts.base ~/src/hosts/hosts.append > ~/src/hosts/hosts.new
sudo cp ~/src/hosts/hosts.new /etc/hosts
I would just say that using an adblocking hosts file is a personal preference regardless of decision to use the links2 browser. But thank you, for those who do decide to use a hosts file, this looks like a good way to proceed. But I think that ideally you should start a new How-to thread and post these steps there, as this would potentially apply to everyone, not just those using links2 in graphical mode. I'd also say that these steps should be able to be put into a couple of scripts and someone could setup their system to run the update commands automatically on startup or as part of a chron job or something. But that could be part of your How-to if you decided to write one.
I think that ideally you should start a new How-to thread and post these steps there, as this would potentially apply to everyone, not just those using links2 in graphical mode.
I would say that, ideally, it should be on https://trisquel.info/wiki (that any user of this forum can edit).
Ideally, an ad-blocking and tracker-blocking hosts file would be a package that's available from the repos and that can be installed and enabled with the click of a button in the software center, like antiX does.
Thanks for share that information about links2, so useful!
Here are some ideas from the user @blur13 on the antiX forum on how to improve the look of links2:
blur13 wrote:
1) use a modern font (Setup/Fonts), I’ve switched to bitstream_iowan_old_style_bt.ttf and related iterations for bold, italics, etc. I think it makes the browser feel more, well, “modern”.
2) Change to Display optimization for LCD (RGB) in Setup/Video options. The default is for CRT. This makes a BIG difference.
3) Create a “dark mode” by changing and saving the settings for a dark style, and copying the config files to new files, eg dark and dark2. There are two config files, one for the HTML options, and one for the Setup options. Before you do that, save your current “light theme” settings to eg light and light2. Then, using a bash alias such as
alias linksd=”cp /home/$USER/.links2/dark /home/$USER/.links2/html.cfg && cp /home/$USER/.links2/dark2 /home/$USER/.links2/links.cfg && xlinks2 google.com”
alias linksl=”cp /home/$USER/.links2/light /home/$USER/.links2/html.cfg && cp /home/$USER/.links2/light2 /home/$USER/.links2/links.cfg && xlinks2 google.com”
You can easily switch between dark and light theme.
These are really good ideas.
Well, now for y'all as the threaded conversation
doesn't look well for answers which
maybe useful for everyone:
For JS-less translations, Peertube search and such:
CLI alternative to translate-shell, just depending on curl,
and fzf for interactive use (optional)
https://codeberg.org/justwolf/stranslate
Translating instances (URLs) in case of some Simply
Translate is not working well:
https://simple-web.org/instances/simplytranslate
General news (no JS:)
All of them will work under Links/Lynx, Dillo and Netsurf.
Enjoy.