Getting the URL of the curent active tab in Firefox

XYZ

5/21/24, 6:46 PM

I'm trying to write a script where I can run mpv [youtube link] to watch youtube videos. For this I would like to detect the current active tab on Firefox and fill in the youtube link with it in the script. I would also highly prefer if I could do this without a firefox extension (I want to minimize my fingerprintability -- not sure that's a real word).

So far I've written a script like this:

#! /bin/bash

currentURL=$(lz4jsoncat ~/.librewolf/*.default-default/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 |
jq -r ".windows[0].tabs |
sort_by(.lastAccessed)[-1] |
.entries[.index-1] |
.url")

mpv $currentURL

To clarify, lz4jsoncat is a small util from here that basically unpacks the firefox jsonlz4 file.

And while this works and it detects the current active tab, there's one big problem with it: there's a ~10 second delay, because it seems firefox has a delay in updating the session file, and that defeats the whole purpose of the script.

Is there a way to detect the current tab's url almost instantaneously through the terminal?

0 + 1

command-line

firefox

bash

scripts

mpv-media-player

richbl

5/22/24, 1:32 AM

**Welcome to the Ask Ubuntu community.** It appears that this question really isn't related to the Ubuntu OS, but instead a scripting issue. You may have better luck working with the [Unix & Linux community](https://unix.stackexchange.com/).

Elon Musk

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EN: Getting the URL of the curent active tab in Firefox

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