Is there any way to use imagegrabwindow() with Firefox or Chrome?

Question

I'm trying to generate website thumbnails programatically in PHP. To do this, I'm using imagegrabwindow() with a COM object:

$browser = new COM("InternetExplorer.Application");
$handle = $browser->HWND;
$browser->Visible = true;
$browser->Navigate($pre.$URL);
while ($browser->Busy)
{
  com_message_pump(4000);
}
$img = imagegrabwindow($handle);

What I'm wondering is if there is any way to do the same thing with Firefox or Chrome? Can I invoke either of them with PHP COM?

Answer 1

You can invoke them with an exec command to the commandline. The Pearl Crescent Page Saver plugin for Firefox will take commandline arguments to save a capture of the page as well.

http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/doc/#commandline

The Basic version gives you less flexibility than their paid version, but the basic version met my needs. It may also work on non-Windows systems, but I haven't tried it.

I tried the Com Object with IE and imagegrabwindow and I just got randomly blacked-out documents. Not finding any help to resolve that situation, scripting a plugin from the commandline seemed the next best viable option.