I have Firefox and Safari installed on my Mac. Safari is the default.

I wanted to try out Crunchy (http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/). It's
developed under Firefox and does not work under Safari. I tried. ;)

It starts the web browser with the following.

try:
    client = webbrowser.get("firefox")
    client.open(url)
    return
except:
    try:
        client = webbrowser.get()
        client.open(url)
        return
    except:
        print('Please open %s in Firefox.' % url)

On my Mac, webbrowser.get("firefox") fails, so this ends up opening in
Safari. Which does not work to view the code.

Thing is, I have Firefox installed, so it should work. But the Mac code in
webbrowser appears to only open in the default browser.

The following bit of code works well enough to get crunchy to work

    class MacOSXFirefox(BaseBrowser):
        def open(self, url, new=0, autoraise=True):
            subprocess.check_call(["/usr/bin/open", "-b", 
"org.mozilla.firefox", url])

register("firefox", None, MacOSXFirefox('firefox'), -1)

but I don't know enough about the Mac nor about webbrowser to know if I'm
the right path. For example, I don't know if there are ways to support
'new' and 'autoraise' through /usr/bin/open or if there's a better
solution.

Attached is the full diff.

Firefox doesn't seem to support a full scripting api, which makes opening tabs and windows harder.

I've committed an alternate version of your patch in r80698: This uses osascript to open the url instead of the open command. I've also added a registration for "safari".

The main reason to use osascript instead of just open is that it might be possible to add support for opening new tabs or windows later on by adjusting the script.

I've ported the change to 3.2 as well.

bpo-8238 notes the problem with autoraise and new on windows. I believe when I looked at that issue that I confirmed that the syntax webbrowser uses on Linux to support those options works on windows with the current firefox, even though I couldn't find them documented anywhere. If I'm remembering correctly, then I would expect them to work on Mac, as well.

Webbrowser needs to be refactored so that browser specific support is not not required to be also platform specific.

R. David Murray: the issue you refer to isn't the one you intend to link to, it is related to proxy settings and doesn't contain a patch related to firefox.

BTW. The firebox-bin binary in Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS does not support the command-line arguments that Firefox on Linux supports. That is, the following command does not work:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -remote 'openURL("http://www.apple.com/",new-tab)'

This will start the firefox binary, but that complains that firefox is already running (because I already had FF open)

This means that it won't be possible to have one Firefox support class that works the same on all platforms.

16:05:57 l0nwlf-MBP:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS$ ./firefox-bin 'http://www.google.com'
says firefox is already running as ff is open.
After we quit ff,
16:09:05 l0nwlf-MBP:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS$ ./firefox-bin -remote 'http://www.google.com'
Nothing happens.
16:09:14 l0nwlf-MBP:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS$ ./firefox-bin 'http://www.google.com'
Opened firefox with url(google homepage) as mentioned.

Also,
>>> import webbrowser
>>> url = 'http://www.google.com'
>>> c = webbrowser.get('safari')
>>> c.open(url)
True
Opens two instances of safari, one with home-page and another with url mentioned. Initially safari was not running and firefox is my default browser. Incase safari is running it opens only one instance with url(google homepage) opened.

I'm closing this issue:

1. webbrowser.get("firefox") currently works

2. firefox on OSX doesn't provide hooks to open tabs instead of windows (neither through the command line nor though AppleScript) which means that the 'new' and 'autoraise' options of webbrowser.open cannot be supported due to lack of support in FF itself.

I searched for proxy+firefox on roundup and the only two issue I got was bpo-8238 and bpo-1160328. None of them seems related to webbrowser.

Sorry, I have no idea where that issue number came from. The correct issue is bpo-812089.

I just retested, and despite -remote being currently undocumented, it works on my windows VM with a current (3.6) version of firefox, and that the actions (eg: new-window) work as well.

I don't currently have an OS X machine to test on, although that may change this week.

I tested on OSX with a current version of FF and it didn't work.