Conkeror | Hacker News Reader

Conkeror

conkeror.org

58 pointsdredmorbius29 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452310

Ah, didn't see that.

That's not a confusing name at all...

Konqueror - KDE web browser / file manager that was forked to start webkit

Conkeror - Javascript based browser with Mozilla XUL wrappings.

Sheesh. Way to cause problems for your project for no reason.

i really thought it would be a project using chromium engine with a port of the konqueror UI

There's an opening for Quonceror to complete the cycle. Then Quonkeror, Konceror, and Conqueror to complete the permutation group.

Immediately after writing down the 6 permutations, I tried to decide which were the most memorable. I decided on Conqueror (because spelling things right should be done more often) and Konqueror (kbecause keverything kin KDE khas kextra kays kat kthe kstart).

i was hoping it was more of this work: http://concuerror.com/

There's also "lynx" and "links", just to fill out more namespace challenges in the browser space.

This is a petty thing to discuss, but there aren't that many browsers in the world, why give your new one a name that sounds identical to an existing browser? (Their FAQ even says the name should be read out as "conkeror with a c")

I read it as Conk-Error and it stuck.

I used Conkeror for a couple years as my main browser and really enjoyed the experience. Combined with a tiling window manager (Awesome WM in my case) it made for a really fun computing environment. I felt really cool being able to navigate through the web without touching my mouse.

Like all interfaces, it was better at some things and worse at others, when compared to a more traditional browser. Ultimately, I don't think I was more or less productive with it. Sometimes I do wish I was still using it regularly, especially after I've spent a few hours in emacs.

I use it with i3, and on a mac (shameless plug: https://github.com/smazga/conkeror_mac_bundler). You really do feel a little bit like a wizard when you can switch from your text editor, browse the internet, and then jump back without touching the mouse.

Unfortunately, many places on the web seem to be trending toward mouse (or touch)-centric design, which makes it harder to navigate from a keyboard.

Still, I really like it.

Why did you drop it (and what do you use now)? I used to use conkeror too, but dropped in favour of firefox + keysnail. As an emacs user, I just loved the conkeror ui. I left it because it lacked some firefox features, can't remember them all but one was on-demand loading of tabs when starting the browser.

I thought this was a fork for the Konqueror web browser. Yikes - what a terrible name.

A screenshot would do wonders for the conversion rate on that homepage.

It pretty much looks like a browser. It's not the looks, but the works that make it interesting; you don't look at it and say, "That looks like it would intelligently employ keybindings similar to Emacs! Look at that extensibility!"

then it needs a screencast that also shows what is being typed.

or a list of strings of what was typed next to high-level descriptions of the actions achieved.

reading down the whole page, the "using" section has 30 links but not a single summary to make me care to click.

Any screenshot of the browser conveys very clearly that "That looks like it would intelligently employ keybindings similar to Emacs!". See the screenshot on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Conkeror_web_browser.png

The lack of buttons and address bar tells you exactly what kind of browser it is and that you should expect it to share many features with things like uzbl and vimperator.

In addition a screenshot like http://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjour... shows you a lot about the navigation tools they have provided.

A browser is a visual tool and many of its distinguishing features are thus much more difficult to explain with words.

Same for text editors

http://www.jesshamrick.com/images/emacs/emacs-welcome.png

Given the discussion of the Vivaldi browser,[1] I thought I'd put forward another that I'm aware of with a distinctly power-user interface, inspired by emacs.

I'm not all that much a fan -- my preferred editor's vi, I struggle with emacs commands, tend to use Chromium, have Iceweasel with Vimperator (both are the Debian versions of Chrome and Firefox respectively). And tend to fall back first on w3m as a console-mode browser with mutt-like keybindings as an alternate.

And yes, I've got the same gripe about the name -- I also occasionally use the KDE Konqueror browser.

But for emacs + javascript extensibility, based on a Webkit render engine, conqueror does strike me as quite the poweruser / hacker's potential delight.

I didn't see the earlier discussion dang referenced, it's from about 5 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452310

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9157075

For all intents and purposes, this project is dead. XULRunner is effectively unsupported upstream [0], and there is no traffic on the mailing list, p < 0.05. [1]

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/o99wQ...

[1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mozilla.conkeror

Is there any reason in particular this browser from a few years ago is on the front page? Given the number of upvotes, I assume there's some context behind this.

My guess is because Vivaldi was mentioned a few days ago

[off topic - My experience with XUL] Time ago I had to work in a project to give maintenance to AtMail... And it had an interface made in XUL. It was one of worst experience I had in software. The error, of course is that XUL was made to build browser components, not website user interface specific to firefox. Just remembered it now...

I used it for a few months as my main browser, but gave up. Would be so so much better as a Firefox or Chromium fork. Sometimes you want the traditional mouse stuff and it's just not there. Looking forward to breech.cc (not on my OS yet).

Just found it today, and it's great, but written in javascript, which kills everything that I like in Emacs (I mean Lisp).

I really like the emacs inspired interface. I would use conkeror for everything if it worked with noscript.

cached version of recent changes page : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KZLv-gy...

Why wouldn't I use Vimperator and be done with it?

If your main text editor is vim, that's probably what you should do. It's hard or impossible to get a good feel from vimperator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com