In my current development projects, I’ve been using a lot of new features of HTML5/CSS3/etc, and fortunately the different browsers have been adding support at a fast pace. Of course, features don’t appear right away in the stable releases that everybody runs, but rather in various alphas, betas, and other pre-releases, with the most bleeding edge being the nightly builds. These builds are (usually) compiled every day, reflecting the current state of the source code repository, with all the latest changes made by the developers.
It’s quite a hassle having to download and install a new version of three or four browsers every day, so I made a Mac OS X app for each browser (Apple Safari aka WebKit, Google Chrome aka Chromium, Mozilla Firefox aka Minefield, and Opera) that checks if a new version is available, automatically downloads and installs it, and then launches it. If you already have the latest version, it will launch or focus it directly, allowing you to have only those 4 icons in the dock, and always use them to access your browsers.
Click here to download them.
FYI, using the latest builds of each browser (as of 2009-6-9), here are the results of html5test.com :
- WebKit : 220 + 7 bonus points
- Chromium : 217 + 6 bonus points
- Firefox : 176 + 9 bonus points
- Opera : 129 + 4 bonus points
For those interested, these apps consist of bash scripts embedded in AppleScript app-bundles, so you can modify them for your own needs (note that by default they are setup to install Intel and/or 64bit builds when available). Please share any enhancements or fixes you might make.
Update 2010-6-12 : Fixed the Firefox updater, so you can use it on 32bit system by changing the line :
my_arch=”mac64″;
to :
my_arch=”mac.dmg”;
Awesome! I’ve fooled around with writing similar things but never got as far along as you have!
I’ve run into a few problems though. Webkit and Chromium work beautifully. Opera and Firefox give me some troubles though.
Firefox gives me an Applescript error reading “Unable to find application named ‘Firefox Nightly’”. When I then go in to edit the script and run it from Script Editor the Event Log tab reads in full:
tell current application
path to current application
alias “Macintosh HD:Users:pdokas:Applications:Nightly Browsers:Firefox-Latest-Nightly.app:”
do shell script “‘/Users/pdokas/Applications/Nightly Browsers/Firefox-Latest-Nightly.app/Contents/Resources/Firefox-UpdateThenRun.sh’”
“Currently installed version : firefox-3.7a5pre.en-US.mac64.dmg firefox-3.7a6pre.en-US.mac64.dmg
Downloading and unpacking firefox-3.7a5pre.en-US.mac64.dmg
firefox-3.7a6pre.en-US.mac64.dmg…
Installed firefox-3.7a5pre.en-US.mac64.dmg
firefox-3.7a6pre.en-US.mac64.dmg”
do shell script “/usr/bin/open -a \”Firefox Nightly\”"
“Unable to find application named ‘Firefox Nightly’”
The nightly Firefox build never launches.
Opera is slightly different. The first thing it does is request via the standard application picker dialogue that I locate Opera 10.5.app. All I see in this list that looks like a candidate is my normal Opera release and Opera-Latest-Snapshot.app. So I choose neither and receive the “File Opera 10.5 wasn’t found.” error. Choosing to Edit the script and then running this script in Script Editor provides the following Event Log:
tell current application
path to current application
alias “Macintosh HD:Users:pdokas:Applications:Nightly Browsers:Opera-Latest-Snapshot.app:”
“File Opera 10.5 wasn’t found.”
I’m running 10.5.8 and would be happy to help test in any way I could!
Cheers!
@Phil Dokas :
In Firefox’s case, the script is downloading the 64bit version by default, so try changing the line :
my_arch=”mac64″;
to my_arch=”mac.dmg”;
For Opera, can you run the shell script in the Terminal and send me the log of that? (on http://pastebin.ws/ for eg)
Note that you must delete the hidden version file (.CURRENT_FIREFOX_NIGHTLY or .CURRENT_OPERA_SNAPSHOT) in your home directory before testing twice in the same day (otherwise it’ll tell you that the latest version is already present).
This is pretty cool!
I am having issues with Firefox… I keep getting the error:
LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error -10810
When I go to edit the applescript, I see these three lines:
set res_path to POSIX path of (the path to me)
do shell script quoted form of (res_path & “Contents/Resources/Firefox-UpdateThenRun.sh”)
do shell script “/usr/bin/open -a \”Firefox Nightly\”"
I did change my_arch to have the value of “mac.dmg”
I am on a Mac 10.5.8, 2×2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon: 8GB 800 MHz DDR3 FB-DIMM
Any tips?
Thanks so much for sharing these apps!
Just dropped buy to say “Thanks for these apps!”
Thank you very much for making these. Very useful and handy.
I’m not sure if the Firefox (Minefield) script is working correctly. It runs it’s course and then launches Minefield, but if I go to help/check for updates, there will still be a security update available. Is this the normal behavior or is the script not working correctly?