Opening Safari's Current URL with Firefox

Firefox rocks. It honors most CSS, has great DOM support, and offers unrivaled development tools. For a guy in my line of work, it's indispensable.

Unfortunately, I just don't like it.

That's partly due to the fact that it disregards many of the Mac keyboard conventions I've been conditioned to use over many years. Some of it is the UI. But, the biggest issue is the fact that I just don't like the way it feels.

(Anybody who spends 60+ hours per week in front of a computer probably knows exactly what I mean, but others can hopefully come up with an appropriate metaphor involving an automobile or something.)

At the moment, my browser of choice is Safari. Now, don't get me wrong, I could draw up a list of its shortcomings as quickly as anybody, but, overall, I like it better than the alternatives. So, that's what I use to retrieve & view documents from the Web. However, I often have occassion to hop on over to Firefox to do something with a given document. That's a PITA, which goes something like this:

1. Tab to Safari's address bar.
2. Command-C to copy the current URL.
3. Command-Tab a few times to activate Firefox.
4. Tab to Firefox's address bar.
5. Command-T to open a new tab.
6. Command-V to paste the URL.
7. Enter.

Granted, that all takes me about five seconds1, but it gets old. Enough so that I've tried to force myself to just use Firefox. I gave it a week.

I poked around Google for a way to automatically open Safari's current URL in Firefox, but couldn't find anything. So, I put together an AppleScript to deal with it:

tell application "Safari"
    set thisPage to do JavaScript ¬
        "document.URL" in document 1
end tell
tell application "Firefox"
    activate
    Get URL thisPage
end tell

If you're running Safari, you can automatically load it in your Script Editor.

I've named mine 2f.scpt, simply to distinguish it somewhat, making it easier to launch with Quicksilver. Ideally, I'd be able to launch this with a single keystroke, but this works.

I fully expect there's a better way to do this, so feel free to tell me all about it.

1. Yes, I just timed myself.