Conkeror

» see conkeror.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first commit landed on 21 October 2004 and its message says "initial revision". The author was Shawn Betts, who had already written ratpoison and StumpWM, two window managers built on the position that reaching for a mouse is a design failure. Conkeror was that argument applied to the web. It started life as a Firefox extension and grew into a standalone application running on XULRunner, the platform Mozilla split out so people could build things on the Firefox guts without shipping Firefox.

What it looked like was almost nothing. There was no toolbar and no visible row of tabs, just a single line at the bottom of the screen borrowed straight from Emacs, where commands were typed and answers came back. To follow a link you pressed f, which painted a small number over every clickable thing on the page, and then you typed the number. Key bindings came from Emacs, with some vi in the mix for people who wanted it. The whole browser was written in JavaScript and was configured by editing a file.

The name is a joke that needed explaining, and the project's own FAQ did the explaining: it comes from conkers, the British schoolyard game played with horse chestnuts on strings, by way of a beer. It sounds exactly like Konqueror, the KDE browser, which is a different program by different people. The FAQ's instruction was to say Conkeror with a C and hope for the best.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

Being built on XULRunner was the whole reason Conkeror could exist with a team that small. It inherited a real rendering engine and a real security model without having to write either one. That trade had a bill attached, and Mozilla mailed it in installments.

XULRunner was deprecated, then dropped as a standalone product. The extension system it belonged to was replaced by WebExtensions, which do not permit anything like Conkeror. By the end, the only officially supported Mozilla code that still ran XUL applications was Firefox 52 ESR, the extended-support branch kept alive for organizations that could not move yet. Version 1.0.4 of Conkeror shipped on 29 November 2017, and it was the last one.

~ the platform went first ~

Firefox 52 ESR reached end of life on 5 September 2018. That is the date Conkeror stopped having a supported platform anywhere in the world. No announcement was made, because the maintainers had nothing to announce that the Mozilla release calendar had not already said.

It did not stop running that afternoon. Pale Moon and Waterfox, both forks that kept the old extension architecture alive, can still load it, and a handful of people have written up how to get Conkeror working years after the fact. That is survival as a museum exhibit, which is a different condition from being maintained.

~ what happened to the address ~

conkeror.org served the project wiki for well over a decade, and the Internet Archive's copy from January 2026 still shows the front page sitting there. It does not serve that now. The domain answers with a Vietnamese gambling site, which is what happens to a lapsed registration with inbound links on it.

~ a taste i never had ~

I am an engineer and I have spent a lot of my life in text editors, so I know exactly what taste this browser was built for. It was never my taste. My browser history goes Internet Explorer 6 because it came with Windows, then Firefox because everyone at university switched, and both of those are mouse-shaped programs. The people who wanted their web browser to feel like Emacs were a real community and a small one, and I was not in it.

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