Make Firefox open an URL or focus the window/tab if already loaded

Question

Is there a way to make Firefox open a new window on a certain URL or raise the tab/window where that URL is already loaded?

I would like to call Firefox with

firefox --open-or-focus http://example.com

and have Firefox either

• open a new window and load http://example.com if no windows are open on http://example.com,
• raise the existing Firefox tab/window that is already open on http://example.com.

Firefox already have a similar functionality embedded in the location bar (try typing an address which you already have in an open tab), is it exposed to the command line as well?

Answer 1

Mozilla's documentation for Firefox's command line arguments doesn't write about any such feature. I tried to check the documentation available on firefox's binary as well and it doesn't do this.

You have switches to open new tabs and new windows but none to get a list of tabs open which you could potentially read off a script.

Simple answer, can't be done unless you start reading the Firefox profiles to figure it out. Doesn't seem worth the effort :)

Also, another thing I noticed when running Firefox off command line is that it blocks your terminal to keep the process running (I'm running this off a Mac but it should be the same for Linux). If you do want to CLI Firefox in a linux environment (considering the tags this post has), you might want to screen it.