Back in the days Netscape had a feature that allowed you to remote-control a browser-session from the command line (using ‘-remote’ flag). I’m looking for a similar feature, but in a modern browser.
A more modern example of what I want to accomplish, but in a different application is Mplayer’s slave mode.
The idea is that I want to be able to remote-control the browser from a Python-script, and do things like load pages, and reload the current page.
Ideally, it should be a lightweight browser (such as Midori) and the reason is that it will run on a Raspberry Pi. For the same reason, something like browser-control using Selenium won’t work.
Many browsers are already able to accept URLs and various settings from command-line variables, but once the browser is up and running, you can’t control it.
I do realize that one could write a simple browser based on existing libraries, but I was hoping that there was an existing solution I could tap into.
Also, just grabbing the page and render it as an image isn’t sufficient, as pages can be dynamic (such as slideshows).
You probably want Uzbl. It’s made to be instrumented via sockets/FIFOs/etc., has no chrome of its own, etc.
We use it at my workplace for dashboards around the office.