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browsers

Python library for detecting and launching browsers

Why?

I recently wrote a snippet for detecting installed browsers in an OSX machine in mitmproxy/mitmproxy#5247 (comment) based on https://github.com/httptoolkit/browser-launcher and I thought this could be useful to other devs since I cannot find an equivalent library of httptoolkit/browser-launcher in Python and the known webbrowser standard library does not support arguments.

Installation

pip install pybrowsers

Features

• Detect browser on OSX
• Detect browser on Linux
• Detect browser on Windows
• Launch browser with arguments
• Launch and get browser by version with wildcard support

Usage

Import

import browsers

List all installed browsers

import browsers

print(list(browsers.browsers()))
# [{'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}, {'browser_type': 'firefox', 'path': '/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox', 'display_name': 'Firefox', 'version': '99.0.1'}, {'browser_type': 'safari', 'path': '/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari', 'display_name': 'Safari', 'version': '15.4'}, {'browser_type': 'opera', 'path': '/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera', 'display_name': 'Opera', 'version': '85.0.4341.60'}, {'browser_type': 'msedge', 'path': '/Applications/Microsoft Edge.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Edge', 'display_name': 'Microsoft Edge', 'version': '100.1185.22042050'}]

Get browser information

import browsers

print(browsers.get("chrome"))
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

Launch browser

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome")

Launch browser with URL

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome", url="https://github.com/roniemartinez/browsers")

Launch browser with arguments

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome", args=["--incognito"])

Specifying version

The get() and launch() functions support specifying version in case multiple versions are installed. Wildcard pattern is also supported.

import browsers

print(browsers.get("chrome", version="100.0.4896.127"))  # complete version
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

print(browsers.get("chrome", version="100.*"))  # wildcard
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

browsers.launch("chrome", version="100.0.4896.127")  # complete version
browsers.launch("chrome", version="100.*")  # wildcard

References

• httptoolkit/browser-launcher
• Desktop Entry Specification
• Github: webbrowser.open incomplete on Windows
• StackOverflow: Finding the version of an application from Python?

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Ronie Martinez 💻 🤔 📖 🚧

Sergey Pirogov 🐛

vanderboon 💻

Stanislav Pankevich 🐛

Amir Rossert 💻

Deep-Tech Showcase and Eaglepoint Funding 🐛

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!