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Comment by latexr

3 months ago

Personally (I’m not the person you asked) I’m missing AppleScript support. Firefox is the only major browser without it, and the bug report for it is old enough to drink in every country.

That lack of capability prevents it from being my daily driver, even if the rest were good enough (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I have no reason to find out).

I am certain I have inadvertently pushed many people away from Firefox for that reason alone, because when they ask for me to add Firefox support for my tools, I have to tell them it’s impossible.

I have tried to talk to Firefox developers about that a few times, at open-source conferences and such, but they think AppleScript is some power-user feature and fail (refuse?) to understand power users drive adoption and create tools that regular users rely on.

I remember whenever a Firefox story was submitted on HN, multiple people commented “I want to use Firefox but it’s missing <whatever>”. Then Mozilla started doing a lot of questionable stuff (all of which they eventually abandoned) outside their core competency and even pulling distasteful marketing stunts, and at some point people started commenting even that. I presume many got tired and gave up on Firefox entirely. I almost have. I now root for them only conceptually, because browser diversity is good.

I also noticed that no matter how politely someone pointed out on HN “Firefox doesn’t fit for me because of <whatever>”, they always got downvoted. If valid polite criticism is buried, no wonder things stay the way they are.

18 comments

latexr

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dingaling  3 months ago

MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD and everything else squeeze into just 15% of Firefox's user base.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

  • latexr  3 months ago

    > They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

    They don’t need to do it themselves, they could just not stifle the efforts of third-parties who do want to and have worked on it. Multiple people started on it over the years and were simply ignored by the devs.

yoavm  3 months ago

Interesting! The last time I used a Mac was many years ago, so I'm not sure what would you do with AppleScript in the browser. What are some example use cases?

  • latexr  3 months ago

    Just so we’re on the same page, you use AppleScript outside the browser, but it interacts with the browser. Some basic use cases:

    - Change to first browser tab whose URL or title matches <whatever>.

    - Close every browser tab matching <whatever>.

    - Grab all your tabs and backup their URLs to a file.

    - Join all tabs from all windows into a single window.

    - Execute JavaScript on a page and get results back.

    - Grab the URL of the current tab and open it in a different browser in a Private window.

    - And many more things.

    • imiric  3 months ago

      Those are browser automation tasks. Most of them can be done with Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium.

      I don't see why a browser should have to support AppleScript specifically. The Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi are the standard protocols for interacting with browsers programmatically. Firefox supports WebDriver BiDi. Just use any tool that supports it, or talk to it directly. Maybe AppleScript can do that, I wouldn't know.

      1 reply →

    • krackers  3 months ago

      Just wait until someone has the bright idea to expose Apple Events over an MCP server or something. Then everyone will be scrambling to integrate applescript into their applications so they can cash in on the computer-use model craze.

      2 replies →