The other day someone was complaining about the new ad blocker-blocker on YouTube and I mentioned that it might be fun to write a Firefox extension that would just load up yt-dlp and play the video through mpv.
It turns out, writing a Firefox extension is easy and tricking Firefox into launching yt-dlp isn’t much harder (though it does require some annoying configuration on the user’s end).
Anyway, if you’re a Linux user, feel free to try it out. I don’t know how much I’m going to pour into this, but as an exercise of “can this be done”, it was pretty good for a few hours on a Friday night.
Is there another way to do this? This hack was the only way I could figure out how to get Firefox to invoke an external binary, but if there’s a more conventional way to do it, I’d like to know 'cause I have another more complicated project in need of a pattern much like this one.
No, the way you did it is the only way I can think you can. Otherwise it opens up things to arbitrary code execution. I’m not exactly sure how qutebrowser gets away with it, but I know it’s built on QT so maybe it just isn’t running sandboxed or had some special method for calling external binaries/scripts. You might take a look at that project and see, but Firefox/qutebrowser is probably like comparing apples and oranges.
That’s actually very helpful, thanks. I’ve been working on another project to open certain URLs in specific browsers/profiles, and wanted to be sure that I wasn’t missing a more obvious design pattern. The project is here if you’re curious.