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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

Does this do anything to improve the browser as a user agent? That is an agent that obeys the user over the server. None of the current browsers are user friendly and none are scriptable except by experts wielding large external programs.

It should be possible to write a simple shell script to navigate the web, to log in to web sites, to extract information. Or something like Visual Basic.

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Puppeteer, which recently added official Firefox support, allows you to write a simple script to navigate the web and such. [1]

btw using the phrase "user agent" in the context of browsers is mildly confusing as it is a specific jargon term.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2024/08/puppeteer-support-for-fire...

that's really an interesting case, most puppeteer and playwright deployments are using chrome. If Verso will be faster they might have an advantage in crawl/scrap/QA.

I guess the closest thing to what you're describing is either conkeror(javascript) or nyxt(common lisp).

Thanks you!

The last change to conkeror was in 2019. Does that mean it's complete or that it is abandoned?

Nyxt looks interesting. Perhaps I'll finally have a reason to properly learn Lisp.

But what I was really looking for was a way to use a web browser as a Unix style tool accessible from shell scripts.

"Let me throw shade on this open source project that does incredibly ambitious thing X and that tons of people are devoting lots of time to, by suggesting they should instead do this other esoteric thing Y that 99% of users don't care about but that I, the entitled power user, think they should be doing instead."

The websites unfortunately do not want to co-operate with this idea.

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