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browsers

Python library for detecting and launching browsers

Why?

I recently wrote a snippet for detecting installed browsers in an OSX machine in https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/5247#issuecomment-1095337723 based on https://github.com/httptoolkit/browser-launcher and I thought this could be useful to other devs since I cannot find an equivalent library of httptoolkit/browser-launcher in Python and the known webbrowser standard library does not support arguments.

Installation

pip install pybrowsers

Features

Detect browser on OSX
Detect browser on Linux
Detect browser on Windows
Launch browser with arguments
Launch and get browser by version with wildcard support

Usage

Import

import browsers

List all installed browsers

import browsers

print(list(browsers.browsers()))
# [{'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}, {'browser_type': 'firefox', 'path': '/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox', 'display_name': 'Firefox', 'version': '99.0.1'}, {'browser_type': 'safari', 'path': '/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari', 'display_name': 'Safari', 'version': '15.4'}, {'browser_type': 'opera', 'path': '/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera', 'display_name': 'Opera', 'version': '85.0.4341.60'}, {'browser_type': 'msedge', 'path': '/Applications/Microsoft Edge.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Edge', 'display_name': 'Microsoft Edge', 'version': '100.1185.22042050'}]

Get browser information

import browsers

print(browsers.get("chrome"))
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

Launch browser

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome")

Launch browser with URL

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome", url="https://github.com/roniemartinez/browsers")

Launch browser with arguments

import browsers

browsers.launch("chrome", args=["--incognito"])

Specifying version

The get() and launch() functions support specifying version in case multiple versions are installed. Wildcard pattern is also supported.

import browsers

print(browsers.get("chrome", version="100.0.4896.127"))  # complete version
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

print(browsers.get("chrome", version="100.*"))  # wildcard
# {'browser_type': 'chrome', 'path': '/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome', 'display_name': 'Google Chrome', 'version': '100.0.4896.127'}

browsers.launch("chrome", version="100.0.4896.127")  # complete version
browsers.launch("chrome", version="100.*")  # wildcard