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Comment by czottmann | Hacker News Reader

Hi, macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago.

Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…

I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).

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I’ve also given up on using Firefox on macOS. I used to be a hard core fan, but Mozilla consistently ignores bugs.

For example, years later Firefox still doesn’t support macOS password autofill api. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212

+1 everything about firefox on macos just screams non-native. And I'm not just talking about minor things like context menus not behaving natively (maybe this was fixed recently, don't remember). There's major stuff that would seem to be trivial to implement that they just haven't bothered doing, like making sure the computer doesn't go to sleep when downloading files [1].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825914

Weird thought, but have you tried using Selenium?

Seems like launching a browser tab with:

    from selenium import webdriver
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()

and navigating to duckduckgo.com:

    print(driver.current_url) # https://duckduckgo.com/

works.

I have. (Web dev here.) I know it works but I don't want to set up all the things just to get some basic scripting capability.

My point is that there is zero local API surface for interacting with the application. That's the reason why tools like Keyboard Maestro support Chromium-based browsers but not Firefox. Which, in return, doesn't help Firefox's popularity, because it's nigh impossible to work with it from other apps.

Disclaimer: I am in a weird spot here, for I am serious about automation both as a consumer and as a software maker -- I write macOS automation tools myself, e.g. https://actions.work/browser-actions

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