I don’t necessarily want to bookmark these sites, and this process of opening them is somehow part of my routine, however spending this kind of time every time I want to get to this state is just silly. Part of the ritual is to go through each of the open tabs, read the most recent updates and then close the tab, repeating this whole process many times a day.

At this point you should be starting to get the jist, to automate this whole process I created a Firefox Extension called MyTabs. The UI and use case is simple, but some of the tools I built in make it potentially very powerful.

MyTabs has the MozMill Controller built in, and is automatically setup in the tabs content window scope, allowing you to write and attach scripts to each tab to be executed ‘onload’. Thus automating the need to ever manually login to your web applications again.


Example script for logging into Facebook:

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//Lookup the three elements I want to interact with
var email = new elementslib.ID(doc, 'email');
var pass = new elementslib.ID(doc, 'pass');
var login = doc.getElementsByClassName('UILinkButton_A')[0];
 
//Controller expects elementslib objects
var elibLogin = new elementslib.Elem(login);
 
//Tell the controller to type the credentials
tab.type(email, 'my_facebook_account@address.com');
tab.type(pass, 'my_password');
//Click the login button
tab.click(elibLogin);

This is all possible by a really slick snipped of code I found on MDC:

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var newTabBrowser = gBrowser.getBrowserForTab(gBrowser.addTab("http://www.google.com/"));
newTabBrowser.addEventListener("load", function() { newTabBrowser.contentDocument.body.innerHTML = "Stuff"; }, true);

Security/Preferences

For the sake of security I made it so that you can only attach scripts, not edit them so that you friends can’t go and view your script to get those plain text passwords. All the tab data is stored in the prefManager so that it is available across sessions. However if someone knew enough to pick apart the source, install a trusted JS Shell and manually access the prefManager you may be in trouble… so be careful about super sensitive information especially on a shared machine.

Using jQuery UI I was able to make the UI relatively attractive, intuitive and possibly skinnable in the future (if you want to do this yourself, grab the source swap out the jQuery UI theme CSS directory and boom you have yourself  new look.)

Some Screenshots

The source is fully available on GitHub, and the XPI is available on Mozilla Add-ons.

• MyTabs on GitHub
• MyTabs on Mozilla Add-ons

Remember that I am currently on bug fix release 0.3, but please let me know if you run into any problems!

Since making things looks really nice in XUL is really hard, I decided that I would build the UI in the current Firefox content window (sorry tbird etc, but I built a less shiny version of this into Mozmill trunk for all of you).

Some of the functionality that I decided was a top priority was some slightly abstracted access to the window mediator which I am calling ‘windows’, and is simply an array of all the different windows available in the whole browser. The other big one is dir(), I am constantly looking for a property in one of the many, many objects I am trying to access and now that is really easy.

All of that goodness combined with enough space to stick real code blocks and a full history (which you can access using the shift key and up/down arrows), I find myself pretty comfortable.

After installing the extension, you can simply press ‘meta (cmd on mac) + shift + s’ and you should be greeted with the following (toggling will show/hide the shell):

UPDATE: It was pointed out to me that on windows meta may not be bound, so I have updated both the extension and git, please try ‘alt+shift+ctrl+s’ or ‘ctrl+shift+s’ on windows/linux, (I am testing in a VM so it’s a bit strange. Sorry about the confusion!) 

Welcome to XUSH

To get started, you can type ‘help’ to see what is available to you.

Help Menu

Other available functionality includes a big chunk of the mozmill controller for driving user actions in the browser, as well as elementslib — which gives you all kinds of powerful features for looking up nodes in the browser.

ElementsLib

As I mentioned above, the windows helper can quickly give you an idea of what is open in the browser and let you directly access the objects in the windows[x] array.

Windows Helper

The nice big console gives you enough space (and using shift) you can do multiple line commands to actually execute code snippets:

Code Blocks

My next round of features will include some more helpers, including tab completion and any bug fixes I find, please let me know of any that you find!

If you would like to play with the source, I have it on github and have a python script that uses mozrunner to launch it in dev mode (with venkman installed, although now I don’t really need it), but saves you from installing and uninstalling the extension every-time you want to try out your latest code changes:

python xush.py


That should launch Firefox with XUSH and Venkman both installed and allow you to hit the shortcut and wham, test away.

After another round of bug fixes I will be submitting this to Mozilla AMO.

Other projects you might be into if this interests you:

• Venkman
• Mozmill
• Chomebug

Thanks for your interest!