Applescript question

I have not tested this with the commented System Events line, but it does work where I have purposely set activeApp to "Safari" and Safari is running in the background. Eliminates the large if block.

use framework "Foundation"
use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite or later
use scripting additions

property NSString : a reference to current application's NSString
property NSArray : a reference to current application's NSArray

set B to {"Brave Browser", "Safari", "Google Chrome"} as list
set activeApp to "Safari"

-- tell application "System Events" to set activeApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true

if B contains activeApp then
	set Ba to NSArray's arrayWithArray:B
	-- because NSArray is zero based, and AppleScript is 1 based
	set ndx to ((Ba's indexOfObject:activeApp) + 1) as integer
	tell application (item ndx of B) to activate
else
	display dialog ("Sorry, not a supported browser")
end if

tell application "System Events"
	tell application process activeApp
		key code 37 using {command down}
		-- Copy URL 
		key code 8 using {command down}
		-- Escape
		key code 53
	end tell
	if ((the clipboard) as text) begins with "http" then
		display dialog (the clipboard) as text
	end if
end tell
return



Using list lookups, and indices is more efficient than multiple if branches. However, I had not considered the valid situation where you may have an active browser with multiple windows. I don't have the Brave Browser, but unless they have provided rich AppleScript support (and it would be different for each browser) you may not have the means to control the behavior of n-tuple browser windows when you run this script.

I confess I'm a little confused about your script.

Your concern stems around being able to activate a variable-based application. Why do you need to do this?

In your script you specifically:

set activeApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true

Therefore, the app in question is *already* activated, so there's no need to re-activate it, no?

Secondly, I would err on the side of direct manipulation rather than UI events to control the apps. Since you can identify the app that's frontmost, I'd just query it directly for the URL:

set theURL to ""

tell application "System Events"

set activeApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true

end tell

if activeApp = "Safari" then

tell application "Safari" to set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1

else if activeApp = "Google Chrome" then

tell application "Google Chrome" to set theURL to URL of active tab of window 1

else if activeApp is "Brave Browser" then

-- I have no idea about Brave Browser's AppleScript support, so use UI hacking, but could be improved

tell application "System Events"

-- shift to Addresss bar

key code 37 using {command down}

-- Copy URL 

key code 8 using {command down}

-- Escape

key code 53

end tell

else

display dialog ("Sorry, not a supported browser.")

end if

if theURL ≠ "" then display dialog theURL