Disable AI in Firefox

Personally (I’m not the person you asked) I’m missing AppleScript support. Firefox is the only major browser without it, and the bug report for it is old enough to drink in every country.

That lack of capability prevents it from being my daily driver, even if the rest were good enough (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I have no reason to find out).

I am certain I have inadvertently pushed many people away from Firefox for that reason alone, because when they ask for me to add Firefox support for my tools, I have to tell them it’s impossible.

I have tried to talk to Firefox developers about that a few times, at open-source conferences and such, but they think AppleScript is some power-user feature and fail (refuse?) to understand power users drive adoption and create tools that regular users rely on.

I remember whenever a Firefox story was submitted on HN, multiple people commented “I want to use Firefox but it’s missing <whatever>”. Then Mozilla started doing a lot of questionable stuff (all of which they eventually abandoned) outside their core competency and even pulling distasteful marketing stunts, and at some point people started commenting even that. I presume many got tired and gave up on Firefox entirely. I almost have. I now root for them only conceptually, because browser diversity is good.

I also noticed that no matter how politely someone pointed out on HN “Firefox doesn’t fit for me because of <whatever>”, they always got downvoted. If valid polite criticism is buried, no wonder things stay the way they are.

MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD and everything else squeeze into just 15% of Firefox's user base.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

Interesting! The last time I used a Mac was many years ago, so I'm not sure what would you do with AppleScript in the browser. What are some example use cases?

> They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.

They don’t need to do it themselves, they could just not stifle the efforts of third-parties who do want to and have worked on it. Multiple people started on it over the years and were simply ignored by the devs.

Probably because they don't want to take on that maintenance burden. Even just letting someone do that and merging it in is opening up a whooooole can of worms.

Just so we’re on the same page, you use AppleScript outside the browser, but it interacts with the browser. Some basic use cases:

- Change to first browser tab whose URL or title matches <whatever>.

- Close every browser tab matching <whatever>.

- Grab all your tabs and backup their URLs to a file.

- Join all tabs from all windows into a single window.

- Execute JavaScript on a page and get results back.

- Grab the URL of the current tab and open it in a different browser in a Private window.

- And many more things.

Then they should just say so and close the open issues, instead of letting them linger for literal decades and have people waste time on them then ignore them. That’s just bad stewardship.

Anyway, the reasons are irrelevant and I’m frankly tired of explaining this to Firefox defenders. Someone asked “what about Firefox are you missing” and I responded with what it’s missing for me. Plugging your ears and coming up with excuses doesn’t move the needle. Accept it or don’t, it makes no difference. In the meantime I’ll continue being honest with my users that I would like to support Firefox but I can’t, and many of them will keep switching browsers.

Given how much resources they've dedicated to lower %, this is not true

Got it. Last time I attempted to do this kind of things, I used TabFS (https://github.com/osnr/TabFS). I think you might like it!

That requires installing a third-party tool which doesn’t look to be under development, and is an entirely different interaction. Thank you, but that’s not adequate.

Just wait until someone has the bright idea to expose Apple Events over an MCP server or something. Then everyone will be scrambling to integrate applescript into their applications so they can cash in on the computer-use model craze.

Those are browser automation tasks. Most of them can be done with Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium.

I don't see why a browser should have to support AppleScript specifically. The Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi are the standard protocols for interacting with browsers programmatically. Firefox supports WebDriver BiDi. Just use any tool that supports it, or talk to it directly. Maybe AppleScript can do that, I wouldn't know.

No, those are not the same thing. The capabilities and integrations are different, and AppleScript works in a vanilla installation.

I'm really surprised no one has done this.

You don't even need an mcp server. Claude Code can just run osascript. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492369

Directly writing applescript is kind of terrible syntax (I doubt there is enough high quality data, even humans find it hard to write) and lacks the discoverability portion. The good part of AppleScript is the self-discovery (via scripting dictionary) and the general graphql-RPC-esque nature of apple events.

The features that firefox does not support are few and far between, and, IME, usually things you do not necessarily want supported.

As a user, I do not want nor need my browser to support AppleScript. AppleScript is something that should not exist. In somewhat typical apple fashion, it's some NIH platform-specific bullshit that nobody really cares about and is only half-assed supported even on it's native platform. The only way to deter Apple from creating these sisyphus-ian pieces of software is to just stop supporting them and force their hand to use something less bespoke. Although, Apple is not the only culprit of this - nor are they even the worst about it.

If I had my way, Mantle would not exist, iMessage would not exist, and some others. We would live in a perfect utopia and then we'd all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.