ffox-remote

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== ffox-remote: lightweight remote control for Unix Firefox

A running Firefox can be remotely controlled to do things like open new URLs; the mechanisms for this are platform dependent. Normal people do this by running Firefox again, for example on the command line by running 'firefox NEW-URL', but it turns out that this has a number of drawbacks (including requiring Firefox itself to start up, which is not necessarily fast).

ffox-remote is a (Go) program that speaks Firefox's remote control protocol on Unix/X. More specifically it speaks the newer and more arcane remote control protocol, instead of the older and simpler protocol that was used to implement Firefox's '-remote' command line argument and which a number of additional tools can use. A program to speak the new protocol has become necessary because Mozilla has now removed support for the old protocol from Firefox Nightly.

Because the remote control protocol works via X properties, you can remote control a running Firefox from a remote machine through things like X forwarding. Because ffox-remote is pure Go code, it can be cross-compiled for lightweight environments where you don't necessarily want to install or build Firefox.

(ffox-remote uses Andrew Gallant's X Go Binding packages for the actual X protocol communication, https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgb and https://github.com/BurntSushi/xgbutil .)

For usage information and more discussion, see the comments at the start of main.go; this can just be godoc'd. In online form, see:

http://godoc.org/github.com/siebenmann/ffox-remote