Python :: How to open a page in the Non Default browser.

Question

I was trying to create a simple script to open a locally hosted web site for testing the css in 2 or more browsers. The default browser is IE7 and it opens the page fine but when I try to open a non default browser such as Firefox or Arora it just fails.

I am using the webbrowser module and have tried this several way as detailed in various sites across the web.

Is it possible and if so how?

Answer 1

This basically boils down to:

- run 'firefox "url"'
- run 'iexplore "url"'
- run 'other_browser "url"'

I don't know enough python to know how the system() call is implemented there but it should be quite simple.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the code any more, but I once did a similar thing with the subprocess module. Basically I just fed subprocess the path to the browser I wanted to do.

Edit: You need Python 2.4 or later to use subprocess.

Answer 3

Matt's right and it's a pretty useful module to know...

18.1. subprocess

IDLE 2.6.2      
>>> import subprocess
>>> chrome = 'C:\Users\Ted\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe'
>>> chrome_args = 'www.rit.edu'
>>> spChrome = subprocess.Popen(chrome+' '+chrome_args)
>>> print spChrome.pid
2124