On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Peter Stevens wrote: > Under the heading of small serious amounts of work... > > I mentioned previously Win32::IE::Mechanize - does anybody have any > ideas on how to do the same thing with Firefox under Linux? [...]
Warning: I'm not up-to-date on this, take what I say with a pinch of salt. I see you want linux, but first a comment about doing this on Windows: I believe there's a (MS-)COM IWebBrowser2 wrapper of Firefox's XP-COM interfaces, so *in theory* you should be able to point Win32::IE::Mechanize at that under Windows. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were much harder than it should be, though (due to the complexities of COM, XP-COM and Firefox rather than the Perl side particularly)... Also, note the comment below about XP-COM only supporting in-process clients -- not sure exactly how one does things, given this. Under linux, I guess you'd have to do one of: 1. Extend the Perl module to interface with XP-COM direct (note XP-COM, unlike COM, is in-process only IIUC, so I guess you have to rebuild Firefox with your new code, which may be a "wonderful learning experience", even if you *are* a battle-hardened C++ veteran ;-) 2. Build Perl support into Firefox. I don't know if such functionality still exists in Firefox (there used to at least some support for Perl, but I have a feeling that was a long time ago, not sure if it's still there... Also, I don't know if it allowed external processes to talk to the browser. 3. Forget Perl and just write what you want in JavaScript. Not ideal, I know, but practical: obviously JS support is excellent in Firefox. See Selenium for inspiration. John
