Most sites are. Lynx is just the web without CSS or JS.

Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.

Not really. Name me a major site that doesn't work at all without JS.

Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/

In Firefox 20.0.1, with Javascript disabled, after the login the home listing has a "The Dropbox website require JavaScript" text.

[EDIT: Clickable, more info]

Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.

Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a <a href="...file..." target="_blank"> - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it.

The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...

I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.

Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design? I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet?

[1]: http://links.twibright.com/

[2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

Implementing JS would be a huge undertaking (they'd have to implement lots of APIs and the DOM, for starters). Such text-mode browsers are usually light on resources, too, and this would change that. Also, JS is usually used with the assumption graphics support is there.