Automa: A Chrome extension for automating the browser | Hacker News Reader

Automa: A Chrome extension for automating the browser

chrome.google.com

111 pointshliyan20 comments

Love the fact that it is open-source and free to use. I can see it being useful for a lot of people who don't want to spend money but know they need to do some form of simple automation using their browser.

It's even open-source [0], makes me feel better since I'm quite paranoid when it comes to chrome extensions.

[0] https://github.com/kholid060/automa

And rightfully so

Browser extension stores should be more transparent about open source and licensing.

And probably they should collaborate with CI providers - eg. make contract with GitHub to sign artifacts with "these files were built using following pipeline from commit XYZ in repository JohnSmith/UserBase".

How can you verify that your extension actually runs the code that's in the open source repository? Extensions' integrity can be signed and verified against something that was also authored by the creator, but what verifies that the code in the linked repository is the same one, not a different one?

I think you can build it yourself and install that?

Checksums are super useful, too - if you build the project yourself, you can get the checksum, and if it's different than the one in the store, you can ask questions.

A web of trust style checksum confirmation network would be invaluable for browser extensions. Building that into a browser's security model would be great - an extension has to be validated with a minimum score or it's disabled unless manually activated.

Sounds similar to Browserflow, which was on HN a few days ago.

Yup, difference being this one is open source. Now it's even more exciting to try out :)

anyone know if this, or something similar could take a list of urls - like an exported bookmarks or other table - and do something similar to what: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloa...

does.. and do it automatically?

I've been trying to find a way to hand over a list of urls and set to download only 2 videos at a time per domain.. then after one is finishes wait a random X seconds and then get the next in the list.

Sounds like it should be easy to put something like this together, just not sure what tools would be most suited for such a thing in this day and age.

Sounds like python and Youtube-dl would be a good fit for this.

untested but something like

    #!/bin/bash
    for line in url_list; do
        youtube-dl '$line'
        sleep `echo $((1 + $RANDOM % 60))`
    done;

What's the most interesting or complicated flow someone has built using this? Just curious.

One use case that got me interested in browser automation is the task of creating a new twitter account which follows everyone followed by an existing twitter account. Aka automating clicking and scrolling the same button down a page.

Something to try out

jira stuff, so boring to create a new issue in jira

What is exactly the use case i am Jira admin and curious to know to offer it my team's..

Try go-jira for this. You can use YAML to template out your tickets and `jira create` to create them. I wrote how I do this at https://www.bbkane.com/blog/career-engineering-by-tracking-w...

Extracting my data from sites like my bank/broker. Currently I'm doing it manually whenever I happen to login. After copying the relevant html, I need to fix the formatting and other transforms before the entry can be added to my sheets.

I'm thinking with this I can get it to instantly select the right fields and prepare the data, put it in my clipboard, then I will be able to just paste in my sheet saving some time.

This is super cool. The Google search demo automation even types the letters one by one like a real user

Does this support Firefox?

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