About three years ago, I wrote a pair of scripts for Microsoft Entourage. They would take the current page displayed in either FireFox or Safari and insert the URL of that page into an Entourage message window. If more than one page was displayed, the script would let you select one or more of those pages and insert the URLs of all the pages you selected.
They have proved to be popular scripts. I have, over the years, received a great deal of feedback on them - almost universally appreciative!
However, Since FireFox 3 was released a couple of weeks ago, I have received more than 40 emails telling me of a problem. The script no longer worked, but just threw an error dialog when the users attempted to run the script. I investigated and found that in amongst all the improvements of FF3, they had removed some of the scriptability (never very great) that was in FF2.
If you look in the AppleScript dictionary for Firefox using Apple's Script Editor, you will find that the class 'window' is not listed. However, it is accessible in both FF2 & FF3. Various properties can be accessed about the window using AppleScript - often by using class definitions rather than script keywords as would normally be done. The ones that concerned me were «class pTit» and «class curl». These properties used to return the name of a window and its URL. In FF3, the «class pTit» returns a 'Null Value' that causes the script to fail. Darren Mahaffy (Managing Editor of MacSurfer and TechNN) blogged about the problem in more depth here.
I looked around and wasn't able to find a suitable work-round, so I was stuck with a choice. Either I could leave the script broken, or I could reduce the functionality to match the omissions in FF3. Reluctantly, I chose the second option rather than loose the script all together (it is one that I make quite heavy use of).
So, "Insert FireFox URLs v2.0" can be downloaded from the Scripts page of my web site. It's the first script on that page. A similar script (but without the current restriction) is available for Safari at the same place.
As always, these scripts are free - all I ask is that you just drop me an email to let me know you are enjoying it and make any feedback you like - bug reports, improvement requests etc.
