Conkeror is a

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

-based

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

designed to be navigated primarily by a

computer keyboard A computer keyboard is a built-in or peripheral input device modeled after the typewriter keyboard which uses an arrangement of buttons or Push-button, keys to act as Mechanical keyboard, mechanical levers or Electronic switching system, electro ...

. Its design is mainly patterned after the text editor

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU ...

, with some influence from other programs, including vi. It was originally written by Shawn Betts, the primary author of keyboard-driven ratpoison and Stumpwm

tiling window manager In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with the organization of the screen often dependant on mathematical formulas to organise the windows into a non-overlapping frame. This is opposed to the more common approach used by stac ...

s. Formerly an extension for the

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

browser, it is now developed for

XULRunner XULRunner is a discontinued, packaged version of the Mozilla platform to enable standalone desktop application development using XUL, developed by Mozilla. It replaced the ''Gecko Runtime Environment'', a stalled project with a similar purpose. ...

as a stand-alone application. Since Firefox 52 ESR (September 2018), when the last official Mozilla browser that supported

reached end-of-life, there is no officially-supported browser from Mozilla for Conkeror to be based on. Firefox

forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

Pale Moon Pale Moon is a free and open-source web browser licensed under the MPL-2.0 with an emphasis on customization. There are official releases for Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subs ...

and

Waterfox Waterfox is a free and open-source web browser and fork of Firefox. It claims to be ethical and user-centric, emphasizing performance and privacy. There are official Waterfox releases for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. It was initially cr ...

continue to bundle XULRunner and can be used to run Conkeror. Conkeror is released under the same set of

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...

s as Mozilla: the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

, the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, and the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

Browsing

Conkeror emphasizes Emacs-derived key bindings and keyboard-based browser navigation. By pressing a key (f, for "follow", by default), Conkeror brings up a small, numbered label beside every element within the current view on the page that can be clicked. The user can type the number of the link and ENTER to follow the link, or type the link name to narrow down the choices; when the part of the name already typed uniquely identifies a link, it becomes numbered one, highlighted green, and then hitting Enter will follow it. Conkeror has a large number of standard key bindings, and more can be added. The following are some examples of default key bindings: (key bindings are case sensitive) Like Emacs, Conkeror makes use of buffers in order to allow multiple pages to remain open at the same time (similar to tabs in traditional browsers). Users can open new buffers and navigate through them using key bindings. For example, C-u C-f opens a hyperlink in a new buffer, C-u C-g goes to a URL or search term in a new buffer, and C-u C-h i opens the start page in a new buffer. Buffers can be cycled through using M-n to go to the next buffer or M-p to go to the previous one. C-x b displays a list of the currently open buffers from which the user can choose a buffer using the up and down arrows.

Customization

The Conkeror browser can be customized in many ways using

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

as the scripting language, much in the way that

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

uses

Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter. Emacs Lisp code is used to modify, extend and customi ...

. Customizations can be as simple as rebinding keys, but can also be more involved; for instance, writing new interactive commands. By default, Conkeror looks for these customizations in ''~/.conkerorrc''. If ''~/.conkerorrc/'' is a directory instead of a file, then all the contained files will be read, which is a technique to enable modularization of bigger customizations. Conkeror also ships with a number of loadable JavaScript modules, some of which provide core functionality; others are user-loadable and provide additional functionality. Conkeror has ''modes'' in which the key bindings, page display or browser behaviour become

uri Uri may refer to: Places * Canton of Uri, a canton in Switzerland * Úri, a village and commune in Hungary * Uri, Iran, a village in East Azerbaijan Province * Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, a town in India * Uri (island), off Malakula Island in V ...

-specific. Some modes, like

xkcd ''xkcd'' is a serial webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. Sometimes styled ''XKCD'', the comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Munroe states on the comic's website that the ...

-mode, come by default. In xkcd-mode, the message which is normally displayed when the user mouses over the

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

is instead displayed in a special font below the strip. Other modes include those for

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

and

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

, and modes can be user-defined as well.

Name

The name of the browser is pronounced identically to that of the

Konqueror Konqueror is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides World Wide Web, web access and file viewer, file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP ser ...

from the

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

suite of desktop software, although according to the Conkeror FAQ, "the full name of the browser in spoken English is 'Conkeror (with a C) to avoid confusion. Also according to the FAQ, the name derives from the name given to the winner of a game of

conkers Conkers is a List of traditional children's games, traditional children's game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of Aesculus hippocastanum, horse chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree i ...

, a children's game involving horse chestnuts on a string, as well as from a brand of beer also called Conkeror.

Notes

References

* * , part
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External links