webbrowser.get("firefox") on a Mac with Firefox "could not locate runnable browser"

Question

I think what I need here is to know which magic command-line or OSA script program to run to start up a URL in an existing Firefox browser, if one is running, or to also start up Firefox if it isn't. On Mac. I'm testing a Python program (Crunchy Python) which sets up a web server then uses Firefox for the front end. It starts the web application 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) ``` I have Safari on my Mac as the default, but I also have Firefox installed and running. The above code started the new URL (on localhost) in Safari. Crunchy does not work well in Safari. I want to see it in Firefox, since I do have Firefox. Under Python 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 (from version control) I get this: ``` >>> import webbrowser >>> webbrowser.get("firefox") Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "/Librar…

Accepted Answer

You should use Launch Services to open the URL. You can do this with the `LaunchServices` module, or with Apple's `open` utility, or with my `launch` utility (here):

`open` is probably easiest:

```
% open -b org.mozilla.firefox http://www.stackoverflow.com/
```

(or, of course, the equivalent in Python with `subprocess` or similar) should do what you want.

webbrowser.get("firefox") on a Mac with Firefox "could not locate runnable browser"

Solution

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