Question

How do you open a new window in safari and then open multiple tabs with different urls in that window using apple script?

Answer 1

The way to create a new window in Safari is to use the make new document command:

make new document at end of documents with properties {URL:the_url}

This will create a new window with a single tab pointing to the_url and make that window frontmost. Note that make new window at end of windows doesn’t work, and just errors out with “AppleEvent handler fails”.

Similarly, to create a new tab within a window w, you can use make new tab:

make new tab at end of tabs of w with properties {URL:the_url}

This will create a new tab in window w at the end of the list of tabs; this tab will be pointing to the_url, and it won’t be the current tab. Instead of explicitly saying tabs of w, you can also use a tell w block:

tell w
    make new tab at end of tabs with properties {URL:the_url}
end tell

That way, tabs implicitly refers to tabs of w.

Putting this all together, we get the following script. Given a list of URLs in the_urls, it will open all of them in a new window; if the_urls is empty, it opens a window with a blank tab.

property the_urls : {¬
    "http://stackoverflow.com", ¬
    "http://tex.stackexchange.com", ¬
    "http://apple.stackexchange.com"}

tell application "Safari"
    if the_urls = {} then
        -- If you don't want to open a new window for an empty list, replace the
        -- following line with just "return"
        set {first_url, rest_urls} to {"", {}}
    else
        -- `item 1 of ...` gets the first item of a list, `rest of ...` gets
        -- everything after the first item of a list.  We treat the two
        -- differently because the first item must be placed in a new window, but
        -- everything else must be placed in a new tab.
        set {first_url, rest_urls} to {item 1 of the_urls, rest of the_urls}
    end if

    make new document at end of documents with properties {URL:first_url}
    tell window 1
        repeat with the_url in rest_urls
            make new tab at end of tabs with properties {URL:the_url}
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell