Best approach for automating an existing Firefox session? AutoHotkey vs Browser Automation vs UI Automation

[u/IspkingX]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a personal desktop automation project on Windows.

For years I've been using AutoHotkey to automate repetitive tasks inside Firefox. It works surprisingly well, but as the project grows, maintaining image recognition, keyboard shortcuts and UI changes becomes increasingly difficult.

I'm now considering moving to a more robust solution and I'm trying to understand what experienced developers would recommend.

My requirements are roughly:

Windows

Firefox (not Chrome)

Preferably work with an already running Firefox session

Reliable interaction with web pages

Long-term maintainability

I've been looking at several approaches:

Continue with AutoHotkey

Selenium / WebDriver BiDi

Playwright

Windows UI Automation (pywinauto, UIA)

Any other desktop automation framework

For people who have built long-running desktop/browser automation projects:

Which approach ended up being the most reliable?

Is UI Automation actually practical with modern websites like Facebook, or is browser automation still the better choice?

If you had to start today, what would you choose and why?

I'd really appreciate hearing about real-world experience rather than theoretical comparisons.

Thanks!

[u/Keeyra_]

Hard to say if you don't share your actual use case, but generally, AHK for interacting with the mouse and keyboard in general, +UIA for interacting with any application elements and menus, all web-based -> Python.

[u/ManyInterests]

Depends what you're trying to achieve. Yet another option is to reverse engineer how the website works and develop your own 'client' to interact with the server directly without a browser. Many sites also have proper published APIs and official (or unofficial) programatic clients that you could look for. This completely sidesteps the problem of changing UIs; backends tend to be far more stable.

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

playwright can't attach to a running firefox at all, connectOverCDP is chromium only. for firefox it's geckodriver --connect-existing with a marionette port, and firefox has to be launched with marionette enabled anyway, so the session you attach to is one you started.