On 1/30/25 8:15 AM, The Wanderer wrote:
On 2025-01-30 at 08:52, Will Mengarini wrote:
w3m needs some serious maintenance. It's still my favorite browser,
but I hear Google is planning to start requiring Javascript for
searches, so somebody's going to have to step up if w3m is to remain
viable.
Planning to? They already have - except that they have a whitelist of
browsers they recognize as not supporting JS at all, and they serve
search results (with different formatting) to those browsers anyway.
They could of course be planning to drop that whitelist too, but so far
I at least haven't heard any reports about that.
If you spoof your User-Agent string to google.com as being for e.g.
lynx, you can get those no-JS search-results pages even in Firefox. It's
just only arguably worth it.
On one of my computers, I've jumped through the needed hoops to set
things up (with a browser extension) to spoof the UA for google.com and
nowhere else. On another, I've switched search-engine defaults from
Google to (the HTML-only version of) DuckDuckGo. So far neither is
giving me such an obviously superior experience for me to decide to
switch the other machine over so they both match.
I long ago set my default search engine to duckduckgo.com .
No regrets!
