AppleScript "open location" broken in 10.12.5?

Yep. Same here. I got it working again.

Pre 10.12.5, this worked fine:

open location ("mailto:?Subject=" & pageName & "&Body=" & urlToSend)

I worked on it for about an hour and this is what is required in 10.12.5:

tell application "System Events" to open location mailtoURL with error reporting

Don't know why, but that is what fixed it for me.

After playing with this for awhile, I have to say this is only a sporadic fix. It works fine a few times, then throws the same old error again. Then it works a few times, then throws the same error again.

It works better than the code that always gave an error, but I don't think this fix is 100%.

I think we're dealing with an AppleScript bug in 10.12.5.

More info on my "fix" that sometimes throws an error. It only throws an error if System Events is not already running.

If System Events is not already running when I run the script, it throws the same error we initially got in 10.12.5. The next time I run the script, when System Events has been launched, the script works fine. When System Events quits itself after whatever period of inactivity, the script throws the error again the first time it is run with System Events not running. Run it again immediately and it works fine since System Events was activated on the last script run.

I don't know if that is tied to the original 10.12.5 bug, but I think they are related since they throw the same error.

I'm going to play with activating System Events early in the script and delaying by half a second.

That works, but I'm not going to launch Safari to create an email message. I'll just stick with open location for now. I could use Keyboard Maestro or UI scripting to complete the same action in Thunderbird, but open location works 90% of the time so I'll stick with it.

I reported this as a bug when I discovered it. They said it had already been reported and my report was added to the original. Today I received a message saying the original report had been closed.

I hope this means the fix will appear in 10.12.6.

I reported this as a bug when I discovered it. They said it had already been reported and my report was added to the original. Today I received a message saying the original report had been closed.

I hope this means the fix will appear in 10.12.6.

For me, using the form:

tell application "Safari" to open location mailtoUrl

seems to work reliably, where just

open location ...

does not.

Same for me.

Same here with a very simple :

open location "http://localhost"

http(s) : no difference

Good point about mailto: links. In my case, I have a service that uses a bit of AppleScript to open a web page, so specifying Safari works for me.

I saw this too. Rather than use System Events, I target Finder and it works.

A more reliable workaround: catch the error and simply try again:

try

open location "http://www.apple.com/"

on error

open location "http://www.apple.com/"

end try

It appears that Apple has fixed the osascript bug in the macOS 10.12.6 beta2; see http://bugs.python.org/issue30392#msg294865