Why starting a new project instead of hacking on an existing one?
This is quite a long story… There are a couple of reasons (maybe we’ll make a more extensive site on this some time…), why hacking on any of the text mode browsers we know about couldn’t satisfy us. Some of them are mentioned on the overview page. One reason is that they are all fairly simple, and almost a complete rewrite would be necessary to implement many of the features we want to have. Also, we do not like some details about all of the existing clients; the project maintainers probably wouldn’t like to change them for us. Finally, it doesn’t seem that any of the authors of that programs (except maybe Links) is planning to make a “bigger” project of it, like netrik is; they obviously intend to keep the programs simple, while netrik will have many advanced features.
