Control Firefox remotely

19 May 2010

Do you wish to have firefox auto-refresh a certain page/tab?
Are you tired of having to focus the firefox window (means, leaving vim) just to switch tab, go back a couple of pages, open a new page, etc?

Fear no more.

MozRepl

MozRepl is a javascript module that can be used to control various Mozilla based applications ‘from the inside’.
It is also an application itself – you can use it straight from the commandline.
Beware though, you’ll have to write javascript.

Since I don’t like javascript, that wasn’t very appealing.
Lucky for me, there’s a couple of Perl bindings, and here’s the most interesting
ones.

  • MozRepl::*
  • MozRepl::RemoteObject
  • WWW::Mechanize::Firefox

Since I had prior knowledge of the WWW::Mechanize class, I went with
WWW::Mechanize::Firefox and started hacking.

So far, I’ve created several functions:

  • load new page $page
  • refresh the current page
  • back / forward
  • get current URI
  • save current page as HTML
  • show basic information about the current page
  • extract all links
  • click (yep! :)
  • load a local page / directory
  • dump the current page as a png. This will dump what firefox have rendered -
    not only what you see. That means, you can make a full-sized
    PNG copy, no matter how big the page is. It also tries to be smart by naming
    the captured pictures after title-tag (escaped to some extent).
    This have been possible with webkit for ages and something I missed in Fx.

Now I have a couple of keybindings in my window manager for going back/forward,
load a uri (using the dmenuurl script from my clipbored project), etc.

The ::Firefox subclass does not support all features of the main WWW::Mechanize
module yet, and therefore I’m using both.

If you want to try it out, you’ll need the modules first:

cpan install WWW::Mechanize WWW::Mechanize::Firefox

When cpan is ready, just clone my repository:

git clone git://github.com/trapd00r/firefox-remote.git

And like always: feel free to fork and/or patch!