Archive for June 3, 2008

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

AppleScript Is Broken in Firefox 3

Luis de la Rosa:

There’s two pieces of data that’s critical for several apps to get from Firefox: the current URL and the current Title. The title portion is broken in Firefox 3. That’s a regression from Firefox 2. Except, it isn’t officially, since Firefox never officially supported AppleScript. There were just some good programmers who added it in.

So what happens when you request the title? It returns random garbage data.

I’ve also gotten reports of intermittent problems getting the URL via AppleScript.

Announcing SquirrelFish

WebKit’s new JavaScript engine:

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.

Oh, and it’s fast.

Apple’s Script

Daniel Jalkut:

Apple should make JavaScript its default scripting language.… It sounds a like I just said “Apple should kill AppleScript,” but I didn’t. You see, the Open Scripting Architecture, on which AppleScript runs, is designed from the start to support multiple languages. Think of the “Open Scripting” part of the system as the part that lets a script tell another application to do something. The specific scripting language you use to accomplish the rest is really of no concern whatsoever. Two languages, such as JavaScript and AppleScript, can easily live side by side.

Agreed. OSA is great, but AppleScript is holding it back.