There are console based browsers like Lynx but they are close to useless for modern browsing as you have described. I have only used Lynx under very specific circumstances - once to download text representations of a list of webpages so I could do word searches through them, and once to download new NVidia drivers after a kernel update killed my X Server. Just use Firefox for your browsing - theres no shame in it and you can still use the console for a lot of other tasks.


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