I actually used text based browsers as my main thing for a few weeks, when I had really bad internet. Ran it thru ssh on a VPS, much faster that way. I found the w3m browser gave the best formatting and mouse support.

When I have a slow internet connection I use the Dillo browser with CSS and image loading disabled. Dillo is also really snappy even on an old computer.

https://www.dillo.org/

Coming from a much more graphical background, Links always seemed easier for me than Lynx.

Not sure if Links is the same as ELinks.

I'd use ELinks or Links2 over Links, AFAIK the originall Links is no longer maintained. There's also partial JS support in ELinks which fixes some sites that require it.

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

In college I had one of those eeePC netbooks. It came with Windows XP on it, but it was so underpowered it couldn't really run a browser, so I threw headless Ubuntu onto it and got briefly good with emacs. I tried a few different console browsers; as I recall elinks was slightly better than lynx, but you could get most of the content you wanted back then, at least. I suspect that a large portion of the web is completely useless if you are still trying to use those browsers now.

I still have one of the original models that came with its own version of Linux. It worked really well with Fluxbox but unfortunately that's no longer being supported, it's currently running Puppy Linux.

Lynx is good! I also use the Links browser, a sort of a successor to Lynx.