compatibility with lighter browsers

[cxd4]

Hi folks. It's been a few years since I've gone to Lichess for a game.

What Lichess today looks like in an X-free web browser.

I was just starting to look at playing there again and became curious if anyone is interested in:

• browsers with the ability to disable JavaScript,
• browsers not supporting JavaScript or
• X11-free and/or text-mode browsers, such as Lynx and Links
• (Out of curiosity--I suppose mobile platform browsers as well, but I'm not a phones guy.)

Looking through the repo issues list, I did not see any titles addressing those. Sorry if I make a semi-duplicate feature request here; go ahead and close it. Basically, the only out-of-the-box package for this distribution I can use to play a basic game against the AI on Lichess is Mozilla Firefox, which I am going to avoid for conservation and system performance reasons.

I believe that the option for minimalist simplicity in playing chess on platforms conforming to the Unix philosophy matters towards free online chess being more free and less restrictive to "bloat" browsers.

Do I come across as overly pedantic in my interests, or is this something anyone else has wanted?

[JoelMon]

three months ago @ornicar posted this in the forums:

As of today, lichess works well on:

• Firefox, 6 months old or newer
• Chrome, 6 months old or newer

These two are the best, hands down. Use them if you can.

We also do our best to support:

• Internet Explorer 11
• Microsoft Edge
• Opera 34 and newer
• Safari 9 and newer

Others and older browsers are guaranteed not to work with lichess, and we don't care.

Not sure if it's relevant to your question but I have a feeling it's not a priority at the moment.

[cxd4]

Ah, yes, that is part of what I wanted to know. Thanks for the paste.

While it is disappointing to see a constricted "free" qualification to free online chess, I figured there is no harm in asking for anyone's feel on the matter, but otherwise I can just close this. These days I just play games over my local machine to avoid the heavyweight consequences of most modern browsers.

[flugsio]

Personally I'm aligned in the same direction, but it seems like a huge amount of work for still a limited set of features to work. Then again, I would be fine with the bare minimum of features. I tried out disability mode in lynx, where you should be able to enter moves by text, but it didn't seem to work.

The best approach might be do this in another project, maybe a different client similar to the app. Alternatively adding some glue for existing chess clients, either in lila or a local relay application which handles the protocol translation.

We briefly had an implementation to find games and receive moves using ICS protocol for relayed tournaments. It wasn't complete and would require much work to support sending moves/auth and so on, not sure how feasible it is to have such clients connect to lichess.

[JoelMon]

The best approach might be do this in another project, maybe a different client similar to the app. Alternatively adding some glue for existing chess clients, either in lila or a local relay application which handles the protocol translation.

This seems reasonable and a great idea for anyone who wants to play in the CL. I like how the marcusbuffett/command-line-chess project (Python) displays the board in the CL.

[cxd4]

Right, I'd done a basic chess engine myself in C which uses a display similar to that but more like GNU.

I actually am half-impressed by the loads of new features Lichess has implemented since the time I left. Some of which I see as excess, but not others--like that games database explorer I'd always pestered thibault for back then. (At the time, he said it involved too much server strain to want it.)

That being said, Lichess has obviously quit being minimalist and simple, for better and worse. It goes against the Unix way, but it makes me certainly agree with flugsio about making a more friendly Lichess a different project. Theoretically it could still be a part of Lichess--maybe make it ascii.lichess.org or something. Actually playing from UCI applications off my disk without a browser may be even better.

I tried out disability mode in lynx, where you should be able to enter moves by text, but it didn't seem to work.

That I am thinking may be because Lichess uses JavaScript, which is about pseudo-required.

I use JavaScript for a lot of projects but dislike it because Lynx has no support for it. Links on the other hand has historically supported JavaScript--it can be built with a compile flag to use it. Maybe reducing the amount of JavaScript on Lichess is not really necessary to making it text-mode-friendly.

It also is quite challenging to make Lichess keep timer/clock support without JavaScript, since there would be no animation on the page telling what the current time is, unless we want to create a bunch of animated GIF images to link each page to on refresh or something else crazy.

Therefore, I do not quite plan to make a JavaScript-free project, but I do intend to evade it.

[Unihedro]

re mobile platforms:

For Android, Google Chrome for Android is recommended. Firefox for Android is prone to performance issues but is also a browser with good support for the technologies lichess uses. The lichess app is recommended for playing from Android.

On iOS, Apple enforces its outdated version of WebKit on all browser developers, meaning all browsers on that platform are pretty much doomed to behave like iOS Safari. But you will probably get the best results with Safari. That said, the app is still recommended over directly using Safari.

(source http://ja.lichess.org/qa/352/which-browsers-are-officially-supported)

[cxd4]

Good to hear it's at least compatible with mobile limitations (even though I do not use phones generally).

Besides Lynx, another lightweight browser called NetSurf would be an interesting test.

Like Lynx, it does not yet implement HTML5, but it is a graphical rendering browser with experimental JavaScript support implemented at this time. I believe it's the only modern browser written entirely in C, due to the lack of dependency on common render engines like Gecko and WebKit and the ability to build and run the browser in framebuffer mode without X or GTK. Like, I can literally remove libstdc++ from my system, and this browser still runs. :)

[zacnomore]

Might the cli version be a good replacement? https://github.com/ornicar/lichs

[ornicar]

We now offer a board API that allows developer to create new clients, including text-based

https://lichess.org/blog/XlRW5REAAB8AUJJ-/welcome-lichess-boards