Some ideas if you use Firefox

[Stephen_C]

Firefox has no AppleScript support so there are limits to what you can do. However, I have used Firefox for years and very much like it. There are some things you can do using Alfred and Firefox and I thought it might be useful to others to list them here.

 

If you already have Firefox running and want to browse in a private window—but not provide in Firefox settings for Firefox exclusively to use a Firefox private window—you can link a hotkey (I use ⌥⌘V) to this AppleScript:

on run
tell application "System Events"
	keystroke "w" using {shift down, command down}
	delay 1
	keystroke "p" using {shift down, command down}
end tell
end run

(I don't like GUI scripting because it's liable to break but that has worked for a number of years now).

 

However, I now take a slightly different approach. At the start of every day I launch Firefox in a private window with a hotkey using this AppleScript:

tell application "Firefox"
   --- Bring app to the front, starting it if necessary
    activate
end tell
-- wait a moment and then simulate Shift + Cmd + W
delay 1
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "w" using {shift down, command down}
-- Simulate Shift + Cmd + P
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "p" using {shift down, command down}

 

I then link that to a 2 second delay and then to a Call External Trigger action which calls a workflow that opens the websites to which I need to login. That workflow looks like this:

The websites are listed in the Arg & Vars utility—each on a new line—and then split to send to the shell script, which is as follows:

for var in "$@"
do
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --private-window "$var"
done

You'll see in the screen shot the point at which the external trigger, referred to above, links to this workflow.

 

That all sounds rather long-winded but the result is a series of websites very quickly opened in Firefox private windows as soon as Firefox is launched. (The latter workflow leaves one initial blank tab that needs to be closed but I simply do that manually.)

 

It is, of course, easy to create a workflow using a Universal Action limited to a single selected URL which enables you to open the selected link in a Firefox private window. Just link the Universal Action to this zsh shell script:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --private-window $1

 

Finally, you can alway search Google from Firefox using a DuckDuckGo bang: there is a workflow for that.

 

Warning: If you're using an older version of Firefox (possibly pre 121?) in the shell script code examples you'll need to change …/MacOS/firefox to …/MacOS/Firefox -bin.

 

Stephen

[Stephen_C]

This (GitHub download link) is a simple workflow I created to search the Alfred forum and return the result in a Firefox private window.

 

If you use Firefox as your default browser fallback search URLs will not open by default in a Firefox private window. For those, like me, who use Firefox private windows extensively that is frustrating. However, you can easily create a Alfred workflow to overcome that problem and this workflow shows one way to do it.

 

In this case I chose not to use the Fallback Search trigger as (because of the scope of the possible search terms) it was simpler to use a keyword and then the search term. (For example, if searching for Dropbox on the forum you may well not get a fallback if you use Dropbox because you'll have the app and a folder on your Mac which will probably appear in your search results.) However, if you wish you could easily use this method to create a fallback search the result of whcih appears in a Firefox private window.

 

The workflow has no dependencies (apart from the need to be using Firefox as your default browser, of course).

 

Stephen