Built in Chromium Support

[roysubs]

I still see code examples that call Internet Explorer and it amazes me (as does anyone actually use IE anymore?). I get that there are excellent libraries written by others that handle Chrome, but it's cumbersome to have to always carry them around, especially when we consider that:

a) Internet Explorer is literally a zombie that no one ever uses, and
b) Chromium Browsers are now the dominant browsers in the world (Chrome and Edge plus some others).

Just a few simple controls that we can see when a tab has finished loading or picking a tab based on title or url, things like that would make it a ton easier to manipulate web things (and these days, the web is kind of important!). This would be great for working in the post-2010 world that we do now(!).

[kczx3]

I wouldn’t count on this ever happening

[roysubs]

Really? No problem, but I'm curious why not?

Considering that Chromium is now essentially part of the Win 10 OS (new Edge is still optional but will very soon be build into standard Win 10 builds) shouldn't AutoHotkey support the browser that 99% of people use in everyday use, instead of a browser that almost nobody in the modern world would ever use (and they would fall over laughing at you if you said "hey, why don't you use Internet Explorer for that task?")?

[just me]

Would you please show an example of built-in IE support?

[roysubs]

I see your point @just me, this from yesterday is calling the InternetExplorer object. I guess though, so much of the world, so many of the things that we do run on a web browser, and automation in that respect inevitably means working with Chrome (or possibly Edge which is also Chromium, or even possibly Firefox, but almost never IE). It would be a huge improvement if AutoHotkey could at least do some manipulations (picking tabs by name, checking if a page has loaded without having to search for the "reload" icon, ability to pick items on the page without tabbing around which is quite unreliable etc). So much of what we all do involves the internet doesn't it?

https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=87207

Web_Browser := ComObjCreate("InternetExplorer.Application")
Web_Browser.Visible := True
Web_Browser.Navigate("https auth.edgenuity.com /Login/Login/Student") Broken Link for safety

[gregster]

Yes, AHK can work with COM interfaces, generally (MS Office, Photoshop, foobar, Adobe Acrobat, and so on). It has no special IE support - that is built into Windows.

If you add a whole lot of bagagge to automate Chrome into autohotkey.exe you will have to carry that code with you the whole time (also in compiled exes) - even if 99.5+ % of all AHK scripts are not about automating Chrome. I think having a separate library for these cases is exactly the right thing - after all, the underlying chrome debugging protocol is still constantly changing (okay, not the basic functions, but still).

[roysubs]

I don't disagree, but I'm not so sure that 99.5+% of scripts don't do this. I mean, I have to deal with web forms constantly for work and being able to automate them in Chrome would be quite a lot of what I do. I know that a lot of people use AutoHotkey for games a lot, but I would have thought that being able to reliably control Chrome (at least for the top 10 or 20 rudimentary operations) would be a massive benefit for lots of things, considering how much we all use Chrome / Firefox. But, no problem, hopefully it's something that might be considered at some point, but understand if not.

[swagfag]

the issue is not that its not useful. the issue is that lexikos is one guy and he has to juggle both v1 and v2. i think having to also maintain on top of implementing this in the first place would simply be too much.
and maintain it ull have to, when google inevitably breaks something and microsoft copypastes it over.

with COM there are no such concerns. its a legacy technology, not likely to change.

[roysubs]

I would only have wanted it implemented if it was simple to add some core functions, but yeah, we are all at the whim of Google, and they could change anything at any time of course.

On the Chrome libraries, is there really just one good one, or are there multiple (and I'd be curious also how often the maintainers have had to change things due to Google changes)? And if anyone has some good scripts that go through some functionality, I'd appreciate seeing any posted here, I'd really like to get to grips with that functionality for sure.

[Xeo786]

I would only have wanted it implemented if it was simple to add some core functions, but yeah, we are all at the whim of Google, and they could change anything at any time of course.

On the Chrome libraries, is there really just one good one, or are there multiple (and I'd be curious also how often the maintainers have had to change things due to Google changes)? And if anyone has some good scripts that go through some functionality, I'd appreciate seeing any posted here, I'd really like to get to grips with that functionality for sure.

There is Chome.AHK https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42890&p=382927&hilit=chrome.ahk#p382927
Its quite simple to use, if you know what is chrome.console and little bit knowledge about chrome.api, with chrome.AHK, you need to understand the chrome profile folder and debugging port setup, you need nothing to install extra

There is Selenium https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=32323
you need to install web drivers
and you need to take care of chrome version and web driver version,

And there would have been some chrome extension https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=86698
We can setup some chrome extension which make AHK and Chrome interact with each other using postmessage, Imacros and uipath doing same they have their own extensions