I tried out Conkeror, a new web browser, today. It is based on the emacs philosophy of extensibility, with Javascript as the extension language. While this is a great idea - the main issue I have with emacs is having to switch to a browser(Yes, I know about W3M, but I’ve tried it and found it too slow) whenever I need to access web sites. So I heard about Conkeror, and decided to try it out to see if I could possibly start migrating to using it for some of my editing.
Unfortunately, Conkeror is not ready for what I wanted to use it for. The first is that by default, the open-url does not have history. In Firefox, I use history to be able to tab-complete to sites I’ve been to before; not being able to do this is very annoying. It seems like a pretty basic thing; every other browser has history enabled, so there is no excuse for Conkeror not having this feature.
Another issue is a slight stall when opening hints. In Firefox, I use the Vimperator plugin, which has a similar hints system to Conkeror. If you aren’t familiar with hints, you press the ‘f’ key and every link on the page is given a number which you can type to open that link. In Vimperator, the link opens as soon as you uniquely identify the link. However, in Conkeror, there is a noticeable delay between identifying the ling and the browser starting to load the page. This seems illogical; I’ve already said what I want to do, why make me wait?
Another, smaller problem is that it doesn’t implement all of emacs’ keybindings. Several times, I have tried to split the browser with C-x 3, but since this isn’t implemented nothing happens(this also seems like one of the things that probably is not solvable via javascript customizations). While this isn’t a major problem - Conkeror is in beta, after all - It is jarring to run across situations like these.
The last issue I had with Conkeror is being unable to actually edit files. Without this, I can’t really use it to edit, can I? While you can obviously edit text fields, and use some emacs keybindings in them (and define more with javascript), you can’t open an empty buffer and start typing. I really, really want an editor/browser combination that isn’t terrible.
While Conkeror isn’t usable for me at this point, it is a very interesting project. I plan on hacking on it a bit; maybe I’ll get it to the point where I can do all my web browsing and some of my editing in it, switching back to emacs for heavier-duty coding. Until then, I’ll stick with Vimperator.