Conkeror is a

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

-based

web browser A web browser is application software 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 screen. Browsers are used on ...

designed to be navigated primarily by a

computer keyboard A computer keyboard is a peripheral input device modeled after the typewriter keyboard which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches. Replacing early punched cards and paper tape technology ...

. Its design is mainly patterned after the text editor

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created 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 project and a flagship project of ...

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

ratpoison ratpoison is a tiling window manager for the X Window System primarily developed by Shawn Betts. ratpoison is written in C; Betts' StumpWM re-implements a similar window manager in Common Lisp. The user interface and much of their functionality ...

and

Stumpwm StumpWM is a tiling window manager that was created when developer Shawn Betts found ratpoison growing increasingly large and " lispy". Intended as a successor to ratpoison, StumpWM is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license. ...

tiling window manager In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlap ...

s. Formerly an

extension Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate * E ...

for the Mozilla Firefox 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. T ...

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 la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

Pale Moon Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customization; its motto is "Your browser, Your way". There are official releases for Microsoft Windows and Linux, as well as contributed builds for various platforms. Pale Moon origi ...

and

Waterfox Waterfox is an open-source web browser that is forked from Firefox and developed by System1. There are official Waterfox releases for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Divisions Waterfox Waterfox shares core features and technologies like the Gecko b ...

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 License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

, 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 license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

Browsing

Conkeror emphasizes Emacs-derived

key bindings computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

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 example 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 that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

as the scripting language, much in the way that Emacs uses

Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs (a text editor family most commonly associated with GNU Emacs and XEmacs). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Em ...

. Customizations can be as simple as rebinding keys, but can 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), an island off Malakula Islan ...

-specific. Some modes, like

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

-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 sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

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 panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

, 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 web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP server and files in a disk image). It forms a core part of ...

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 allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

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 traditional children's game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conke ...

, 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