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Comment by HeckFeck | Hacker News Reader

You won't regret it and you won't miss anything. Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test? At least you aren't participating in your own psychological manipulation and are resisting WEI.

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> and you won't miss anything.

I would very much miss AppleScript support. It’s the number one reason I (and many users of my tools) don’t touch Firefox. Fortunately, Webkit browsers (Safari, Orion) have got that covered. Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are a more common choice.

Ah, got me :) How are you using AppleScript with your browser? It's something I've yet to explore on MacOS.

See my other answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37475250

Isn't AppleScript effectively dead ? Apple disbanded the Mac Automation team back in 2016 and even fired the product manager AFAIK. At some point in time, it will be removed from the macOS stack and very few people will even notice.

I used to think so too, but I have a ton of experience with AppleScript and its JavaScript counterpart and they’re still solid. JXA’s Objective-C bridge is a convenient way to access macOS APIs in a scripting language.

One might think the introduction of Shortcuts would be the best time to retire AppleScript, yet Apple made it possible to run shortcuts via AppleScript and one of the standard tasks allows you to run AppleScript from within.

Super curious what you're doing with AppleScript + the browser. I definitely prefer Safari over Firefox. Haven't tried Orion yet but I'm super stoked there's another webkit browser.

One example is a script to quickly grab the URL of the current tab and send it to mpv¹ for playing or yt-dlp² for downloading. Or send some JavaScript to that same tab. Or grab the URLs and titles of all tabs in all windows that match a specific domain, close them, and then reopen them together in a brand new window (or save it to clipboard to send someone). Alfred³ has a ton of automations that allow you to do that without having to code it yourself.

¹ https://mpv.io

² https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

³ https://www.alfredapp.com

> Or grab the URLs and titles of all tabs in all windows that match a specific domain, close them, and then reopen them together in a brand new window

That sounds pretty useful! any chance that script is on gist.github.com or elsewhere?

It’s all done with Alfred’s Automation Tasks.

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/automations/automat...

You don’t need applescript to script events in firefox. You could probably do it in pure bash.

I’m not scripting events, I’m extracting information from the open tabs, such as titles and URLs. See my other answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37475250

> Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test?

The person who has to access a site that takes advantage of that parsing trick every day, I assume.

Shaving a few microseconds off of internal loading is absolutely meaningless when there are hundreds of milliseconds of third party JavaScript being downloaded, and your browser is actively removong the features that allow you to not do that.

You'd be surprised. I had to chase down a rendering bug that made an infinite scrolling widget unusable on Firefox because it did recursive layout when flexboxes were within a scrollable div. A 2% performance hit can matter in the modern context of hundreds to thousands of layout elements.

That having been said... This is an ecosystem thing and if everybody were to switch to Firefox it would be Chrome that had the weird rendering bugs because people would be testing on Firefox first and wouldn't be using layouts that Firefox didn't handle cleanly.

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