phetch

For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch: https://github.com/xvxx/phetch It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic. Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/

And those Gopher browsers can be really tiny. I think both Jaruzel's Gopher Browser For Windows [1] and Phetch [2] are under a megabyte. Rather than a new web standard or ignoring "legacy", I'd point out that there are even web browsers for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. You don't need to implement every tag, the point of HTML is to ignore tags you don't understand and it should still render. Pages with correct markup are still readable in ancient browsers that don't understand CSS. If your page isn't readable in Lynx and Links, you didn't code it properly. You can't support every site obviously, but Links [3] has shown you can go a long way by just supporting a subset of web features. The speed when you're not trying to render pixel perfect layouts is astonishing. [1] http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind... [2] ht

There's also the original pre-web Gopher protocol, which has been getting a lot more users since being mentioned on HN a few weeks ago together with Gemini. Gopher seems to appeal to people who like retro-computing - the TLS requirement of Gemini rules out even older Macs, nevermind the Apple IIs and Commodore 64s that can still access Gopher. For anyone curious, Phetch is a really good terminal-based browser for Gopher written in Rust [1], and Jaruzel's Gopher Browser For Windows is a very easy to use GUI browser that also supports image files. Both are under 1MB. (If you're running Haiku OS, Gopher is still built-in to the default WebPositive browser.) [1] https://github.com/xvxx/phetch [2] http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...