TabFS
TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.
The files inside a tab’s folder directly reflect (and can control) the state of that tab in your browser.
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This gives you a ton of power, because now you can apply all the existing tools on your computer that already know how to deal with files -- terminal commands, scripting languages, point-and-click explorers, etc -- and use them to control and communicate with your browser.
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This is impressive, but damn if this doesn’t sound like a malicious developer’s wet dream. Nuking the browser sandbox from orbit. Complete access to the contents of all open pages. Hopefully it isn’t easy to install in the background...
Fantastic.
I saw this last week, but have struggled to think of any practical uses for it. Great tech demo, but does anyone have some real-world problems they could see this helping, or new workflows it would enable? I'd love to understand how this can be put to use.
There are a bunch of ways this could be useful, off the top of my head:
- Quickly archiving a page with all of its resources
- Downloading images (and other resources) the website loads in ways that make it harder to just save the resource from the browser directly
- Getting a quick overview over everything the page loads when debugging a website (also possible with most browsers' dev tools, but this could be an alternative that allows you to easily open JS files in a real text editor, for example)
Wow, that's a really clever idea.