The uzbl browser

[fos]

This is an interesting development. I think it is worth watching. I wonder if it could be adapted as a TTS web browser? -- fos

Uzbl follows the UNIX philosophy - "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

very minimal graphical interface. You only see what you need
what is not browsing, is not in uzbl. Things like url changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, downloads, ... are handled through external scripts that you write
controllable through various means such as fifo and socket files, stdin, keyboard and more
advanced, customizable keyboard interface with support for modes, modkeys, multichars, variables (keywords) etc. (eg you can tweak the interface to be vim-like, emacs-like or any-other-program-like)
focus on plaintext storage for your data and configs in simple, parseable formats
Uzbl keeps it simple, and puts you in charge.

Uzbl is under heavy development and should be considered alpha. See the Get uzbl (http://www.uzbl.org/get.php) page

[uteck]

# very minimal graphical interface. You only see what you need
# what is not browsing, is not in uzbl. Things like url changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, downloads, ... are handled through external scripts that you write
Yeah, right. Bookmarks are a key part of browsing. The one thing I value most in my personal directory are my bookmarks. A browser that can not handle changing url's, how wonderfully useful, in a way that is not.

We actually did some attempts to make uzbl "usable by default" but in the end we had to conclude it cannot be done because of the following reasons:
Not even usable without jumping through hoops. Another example of people thinking that minimal is somehow 'better' then usable. How about you just output tcpdump to a window and then I can write a script to parse the output?

[fos]

I frequently use lynx for a minimal browser.

I was mainly thinking about the potential for low vision users. A minimal browser that is adapted to a text to speech synthesizer would be very interesting.

Jeff