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Re: question about debian software development?



Le 23/09/2025 à 23:46, Karen Lewellen a écrit :
Hi All,
Perhaps my question speaks to Linux development generally, but it is aimed for developers here. Likely tied to Google recently losing an antitrust suit around its search tool, the company removed direct access to google search for many lower graphics and open source browsers. Tools like Links, and elinks, both of which employ some JavaScript. Along with lynx and w3m..I believe that is the name of the tool.
my question is this.
Links and e-links are fine tools, I even use a DOS port of links on my desktop. However the programs, as I understand it, both would benefit from additional coding work around JavaScript.  Google currently rejects both..even though both worked previously.
How much would it cost to pay  a developer to upgrade these tools?
Generally speaking do developers work by the hour, or on a blanket basis per project?
serious answers only please.

Best,

Karen Lewellen

Hello Karen,

First of all, I do not use text web browsers so take what I say with a grain of salt if you know all of this or if it is ridden with errors :-)

1) In order to use Google search with elinks in my case it was sufficient to modify the user-agent to fake Firefox-esr:

a) if you do not already have a elinks.conf file, copy /home/didier/.elinks/elinks.conf to /home/didier/.config/elinks/elinks.conf
 (replacing 'didier' by your username

b) edit /home/didier/.config/elinks/elinks.conf (replacing 'didier'...) to modify the user-agent: set protocol.http.user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0"

2) I could now access the Google search that was previously denied

3) but I cannot run it: when I enter a search string in the search field it proposes to save it under a file. I thus suppose that javascript support is not enabled by default

4) Of all the text web browsers, only elinks seems to still have (links had but dropped it) partial (only ECMAscript) javascript support. But apparently it has to enabled manually:
http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/html/manual.html-chunked/ch01s06.html

Good luck :-)


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