[BUG and temporary fix] Open Firefox as the frontmost window (macOS-specific)

[zaydek]

This is both a bug and a temporary fix for Firefox -- ‘Nightly’ on (macOS 10.14.6 / Playwright 0.10.0) opens in the background which is unexpected behavior.

The expected behavior is that Nightly opens as the frontmost window, just the same as with Chromium and WebKit.

Here’s a temporary fix I’m using that is macOS-specific

import { execSync } from "child_process"

// Bring to front:
execSync("osascript -e 'activate application \"Nightly\"'")
// Open as edge-to-edge (for me, my dimensions are 1440px x 900px
execSync(`osascript -e '
	tell application "System Events" to tell process "Nightly"
		set position of window 1 to {0, 0}
		set size of window 1 to {1440, 900}
	end tell
'`)

Note that this requires adding your terminal to System Preferences:

System Preferences
→ Security & Privacy
→ Privacy
→ Accessibility
→ Allow the apps below to control your computer.

You’ll most likely be prompted to do this anyway.

I hope this helps someone!

[zaydek]

Follow-up: I found @pavelfeldman’s comment about how fix the browser args for Firefox removes the need for the second execSync call.

So then you should only need the following to open Firefox as the frontmost window:

import { execSync } from "child_process"

// Bring to front:
execSync("osascript -e 'activate application \"Nightly\"'")

I checked the command-line args for Firefox but didn’t see any official way to do this with a Firefox binary. @digitarald any tip on how to open Firefox as the frontmost window for any OS from the command-line?

[zaydek]

🎉