[Conkeror] Conkeror project status?

[Jeremy Maitin-Shepard]

Axel Beckert <abe at deuxchevaux.org> writes:

> Hi,
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 02:27:00PM -0800, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote:
>> > Hi, I'm a very happy user of Conkeror for some 6 months or so, having got
>> > fed up of reverting from w3m to Firefox for sites that use Javascript. I
>> > hope no one takes it the wrong way if I ask what the feelings are on this
>> > list about its future? How many developers are there and how quickly are
>> > new features added? What is the best guess for how many users there
>> > are?

> There are statistics for at least the Debian package of conkeror and
> the numbers are rising there in the average:

>   http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=conkeror

>> I can provide some assurance that Conkeror isn't going to stagnate
>> completely anytime soon,

> Ohloh sees the development quite positive:

>   * Increasing year-over-year development activity
>   * Large, active development team
>   * Established codebase

> (From https://www.ohloh.net/p/5294)

>> as I (and I believe the other developers as well) depend on it for
>> our web browsing needs and don't see there being any comparable
>> alternative browser coming out.

> There is the vimperator plugin for FF which is comparable with the old
> conkeror while it was just a FF plugin. It's though of course using vi
> keybindings instead of emacs keybindings and therefore the keybindings
> are not "comparable". ;-)

Heh, yes of course.  Somehow I forgot about Vimperator.

>> (If Google Chromium is finally released for Linux and proves to be
>> amenable for implementing a Conkeror-like browser on top of it, then
>> I (and perhaps some other developers) might indeed be tempted to try
>> to rewrite Conkeror for it,

> I would be really happy if this _won't_ happen. I don't want to put
> any effort in a browser which invades privacy so much.

I can understand your desire to not leak personal information to Google,
and I agree with your sentiment.  I haven't actually looked at Chromimum
much, as it doesn't support Linux currently, but I imagine that any
privacy leaking issues are related to not-very-important features that
could easily be removed.  Chromium is free software, after all.

>> Development of Conkeror is somewhat slower now than it has been at
>> various points in the past, though there are a good number of
>> reasonably active developers (about 4-5), and the slowdown is in,
>> part, I think, because many important features have already been
>> implemented.

> IMHO it's stable and usable, but the lack of some not so important but
> though everywhere else available features like e.g. a bookmark and
> cookies manager surely hinders its spreading.

>> It is hard to estimate the number of users, since we only really know
>> about those that speak up on the mailing list or on the IRC channel.

> See above for the Debian popularity contest stats.

> BTW, I think it would be helpful to send a user agent string which
> includes the name "Conkeror" somewhere instead of only "Mozilla/5.0
> (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008122010" so that
> Conkeror gets noticed in site access statistics.

> Looked into the code, but not sure where to do this. Probably in
> modules/utils.js around line 580.

> zzo38 suggested on IRC something like 

>   session_pref("general.useragent.extra.conkeror",
> "Conkeror/"+conkeror_version);

session_pref should not be used in Conkeror's own code normally, as it
is intended for user customization use only.  It could be placed in
defaults/preferences/, though.  There is the issue, though, that many
people use Conkeror through git directly and that does not make it easy
to add such version numbers (which would presumably be just a date or
git commit hash).

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard