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". ;-)

> (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.

> 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);

                Regards, Axel
-- 
Axel Beckert - [email protected], [email protected] - http://noone.org/abe/
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