Firefox Control

Control Firefox via WebDriver BiDi on port 9223. Direct BiDi WebSocket, no geckodriver. Use port 9223 because more popular Chrome CDP occupies 9222.

Launch Firefox: firefox --remote-debugging-port 9223

TEST TOOL: navigator.webdriver=true — detected by every anti-bot system. No toggle exists. Use Chrome CDP for production automation.

Usage

Just run a command — the daemon auto-starts on first call and connects to Firefox on port 9223. If Firefox isn't running or doesn't have remote debugging enabled, the error message will say so.

Full command list: uv run firefoxctl.py --help Per-command help: uv run firefoxctl.py COMMAND --help

Always use uv run (PEP 723 inline dependencies):

uv run firefoxctl.py list
uv run firefoxctl.py --json list
uv run firefoxctl.py open https://example.com
uv run firefoxctl.py status
uv run firefoxctl.py targets
uv run firefoxctl.py stop

--json goes BEFORE the subcommand (global flag). The daemon idles out after 5 min. Unix socket: /tmp/firefoxctl-{uid}.sock. Tool responses are sanitized against prompt injection.

Target commands

All target commands: uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT COMMAND [ARGS]

Context ID from list output (full UUID required — no prefix match).

uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT eval "document.title"
uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT screenshot -o page.png
uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT console-tail --for 30
uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT navigate https://example.com

navigate and open may hand you a different context back. Firefox sometimes answers a navigation by replacing the browsing context rather than reusing it — the id you asked for is destroyed and a new one appears at the target URL. navigate follows the swap when it can identify the replacement:

uv run firefoxctl.py --json navigate "$ctx" https://example.com/feed.json
# {"navigation": "...", "url": "...", "context": "<same id>"}
# {"navigation": null,  "url": "...", "context": "<NEW id>", "context_swapped": true}

Read context back from the result — do not reuse the id you passed in, and for open, not the tab you think it created. open navigates through the same path: its navigation is always a context's first, which is exactly the one a container assignment replaces.

It adopts a new context only when that context is new, at the address you requested, and in the window the original was in, and refuses when two qualify. A Firefox that does not report clientWindow gets no recovery at all — the discard propagates, as it did before this existed. The address comparison is exact — query and fragment included, and only an empty path is treated as /. A target that redirects therefore raises: the replacement is at the redirected address, which no longer matches. Navigate to the final URL, or handle the error.

Navigation failures propagate unchanged.

DOM helpers

Shorthands for common eval patterns. Selectors are CSS.

  click/check/uncheck/highlight SELECTOR
  submit/clear FORM
  type/fill SELECTOR TEXT
  select SELECTOR VALUE
  get-text/get-html/get-value/exists/count/get-texts SELECTOR
  get-attr SELECTOR ATTR
  scroll-to/wait-for/wait-hidden SELECTOR
  wait-text SELECTOR TEXT
  navigate URL
  wait-url PATTERN
  scroll-up/scroll-down [PIXELS]
  scroll-by X Y
  inject-css CSS
  reload/back/forward/get-title/get-url/scroll-top/scroll-bottom

Wait commands: --timeout N (default 10s)

For anything not covered: uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT eval "JS expression"

Top-level await: uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT eval "await fetch('/api').then(r => r.json())"

Raw BiDi

uv run firefoxctl.py bidi browser.getClientWindows
uv run firefoxctl.py bidi browsingContext.getTree --params '{}'

Gotchas

A container assignment replaces the context mid-navigation

browsingContext.navigate can return Error: Browsing context got discarded when the navigation succeeded — the page is loaded under a new id.

The cause is a userContext (container) switch. An extension such as Multi-Account Containers assigns a site to a container, and a context cannot change container in place, so Firefox builds a new one and discards the old. Measured on www.reddit.com 2026-09-22: the replacement carries the requested URL, the same clientWindow, and the assigned userContext. It is host-specific — only sites with an assignment rule swap — and first-navigation only: once a context is in the container, it navigates normally.

Consequences:

• A profile with no container rules never sees this, so it will not reproduce on a clean test profile.
• Creating the tab directly in the assigned container (browsingContext.create with userContext) avoids the swap. The container's BiDi id is generated per session — read it from browser.getUserContexts, never hardcode it.
• BiDi exposes no "replaced context X" relation, so navigate's recovery is a heuristic. What is left of it after the URL and window checks: the user would have to open that exact URL, in that window, between the snapshot navigate takes and the end of the wait. Accepted, not eliminated — "new" is new since that snapshot, not since Firefox acted on the navigation.

If you need certainty rather than a narrow risk: validate what you get back (the document's origin, or a marker you set before navigating), or drive a window nothing else can create contexts in.

list URLs lie on error pages — validate before trusting a tab

A Firefox error page (about:neterror, e.g. after a transient DNS failure) keeps the requested URL in list output. So picking a tab by matching its URL silently selects a dead tab:

uv run firefoxctl.py list          # shows https://example.com/  ← looks fine

but the document is an error page with an opaque origin, so every fetch() from it fails — relative URLs with "X is not a valid URL", absolute ones with NetworkError — and eval still works, which makes it look healthy.

Check the document, not the listing:

uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT eval "document.baseURI"      # about:neterror?e=dnsNotFound&u=...
uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT eval "String(window.origin)" # "null"

A live page has baseURI starting with the real URL and origin equal to the site. Recover by re-navigating the same context:

uv run firefoxctl.py CONTEXT navigate https://example.com/

This bit the wiki's daily fetch pipeline twice in one week (2026-07-31, 2026-08-04): the tab died on a DNS blip, every subsequent run silently returned 0 posts, and the failure looked like a quiet news day rather than an error. Any script that reuses a long-lived tab should validate baseURI + origin after selecting it, and treat an empty result as an error rather than as data. See research/2026-04-05-m5-max-local-llm/scripts/fetch_daily.py (_firefox_tab_is_live) for a reference implementation.

navigate rejects about: URLs and unresolvable hosts

BiDi refuses both, so you cannot force an error page to test recovery paths — verify the detection predicate against captured values instead.