Develop Reference

Minimizing apps via nodejs || plain js

I'm currently working on personal automation project and I want to add 'minimize app' feature.
For example: When I click button, I want to minimize the current browser. I already have window.close(); but this will close the app definitly. I found things like window.minimalize(); or window.minimize();, but none of them worked for me. So is there a way to minimize app?
Edited: It does not have to be only client-side JS, it can be used as terminal based nodejs app. Ex: I type minimize Google Chrome, and it will minimize it.

One Google search for how to minimize browser gives the following result:
There is no way to minimize the browser window within javascript. No, there isn't. However, depending on what you're doing and which browsers you're targeting, you could play around with the blur and focus events of the window to achieve similar effect.
Alternatively, if such control is required, you could always port your code to Electron.js or Neutrino.js, which were made to let you create desktop applications using JavaScript.
Maybe if you post some code and give us a train of thought to follow, we could work something out.

Communicate between 2 google chrome processes (tabs) with javascript

Question:
What is the best way to communicate between separate Google Chrome rendering processes (tabs) without the use of a web-server?
Background:
I am writing a large application and recently I decided to try and migrate the whole thing to the browser. Due to where I work this is Google Chrome. Previous the application consisted of a c++ based (Qt) webserver / calculation engine and the browser was only used for the GUI. Now I have moved the calculation engine to javascript and I run it in the browser.
The problem is that the GUI is slightly unstable. It will often stay running for about 12 hours but then crash with an "Aw Snap" error. Before I wasn't worried because it was a simple matter of refreshing the page. Now when the GUI crashes because it is running in the same process as the calculation engine, that crashes also.
Details:
The calculation engine is now a web-page that spawns a number of web-workers. It also opens the GUI (a separate webpage) as a popup window and communicates to it using PostMessage.
The GUI typically needs to read ~ 500 floating point numbers / second (sent as JSON) from the calculation engine and write back ~ 5 numbers / second.
Yesterday I got excited because I discovered the SharedWorker API which I thought would accomplish was I wanted. Today however, I learned that recently modifications were made to Chrome so the SharedWorker actually runs in the same process as the attached tabs and it actually forces all the tabs attached to it into one process. Apparently it didn't used to do this. Does anyone know if there are any browser flags that I can set to revert to the old behavior?
I also have read a little bit about ServiceWorkers and other new APIs such as WebRTC. I have also played around with the storage APIs and thought that maybe they could be used to get two separate processes (tabs) to communicate at the rates that I need.
I want a solution that will work locally (using switches like --allow-file-access-from-files) and that doesn't require plugin installation (since even local plugins are blocked where I work).
NOTE: I saw some other similar questions but they didn't specifically address the need for there to be separate processes (only separate tabs)

Well, it looks like I figured out the answer already. The problem turned out to be how I was trying to open the GUI window.
I had a link on the calculation engine that the user clicked on to open the window:
Open GUI
However, it turns out that adding rel="noreferrer" will cause chrome to open the window in a new process.
Open GUI in new process
After I figured this out, the SharedWorker began to function as I had expected and I was able to keep by engine tab running even when the GUI tab crashed.

Browser Instrumentation

I need to mimic the behavior of a browser. For Say I need to acess the DOM properties of a webpage (ex. Document.cookie or window.onblur etc) without loading a webpage in an actual browser and without interacting (ex. clicking button, putting mouse over a link etc) in the browser.
Infact, I am trying to do some thing where I have an imaginary browser Object BROWSER. So, I can do :
BROWSER g = BROWSER.load('google.com');
g.document.cookie();
g.window.onblur();
I guess this is known as 'browser instrumentation'. How Can I do it ? Any ideas.. ?

Your best bet is probably Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/). Although it does use a real browser (which is sort of necessary if you want to test things in a real browser environment), it will allow you to completely automate/control that browser to make it do whatever you want. Using it you can write code like this:
# Pseudo-code to search for Selenium on Google
browser.open('www.google.com')
browser.findElementByCSS('#search').value('Selenium')
browser.findElementByCSS('#submitButton').click()
which sounds like what you are trying to do.

Is this something you're looking for? It's called PhantomJS
From the site:
Full web stack, No browser required
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.
Run functional tests with frameworks such as Jasmine, QUnit or CasperJS.

Is there a way using jQuery or Javascript to force a page to open in Firefox?

Is there a way using jQuery or Javascript to force a page to open in Firefox? For example, if the user has their default browser set to internet explorer, but they have firefox on their computer - open a new firefox window with the intended page. If so, I would need to check to see if they have firefox on their machine; otherwise, redirect to the mozilla firefox download site...
any suggestions?

The answer, simply, is no. They don't have file system access like that for security reasons. You can probably imagine what would happen if, say you wrote a program that could crack open QuickBooks and take a look around. If you're worried about compatibility, you can use JavaScript checks to notify them that your page needs to be viewed with Firefox and refuse continuation until they get that settled.
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
Or, you know, do it the old fashioned way and build a web page that is cross-browser compatible.
Alternatively, ActiveX might be able to do it, but the user has to accept permissions, and this is highly shady activity.

No. Web browsers do not provide information on other applications installed on a system. It would have security ramifications, such as presenting a fake McAfee antivirus dialog to folks who had McAfee antivirus installed.

Any way to detect browser running through Terminal Services?

I am working on a site that has some jquery based animation, and I was wondering if there is any way to detect if the site is running in browser that is being run in a terminal services (remote desktop) session so I can disable the animation?
I run through remote desktop quite often from remote locations and animations always annoy me, but I really like them when I'm not running through remote desktop. Is there any way to ease the pain without getting rid of animations all together?
I guess I could allow the user to turn them off, and have it store a cookie... but is there any way to do it automatically?

This is almost certainly impossible with JavaScript (way, way above the level JavaScript operates at). It may be possible via something like Flash or ActiveX.
Edit: You will likely need something along the lines of what nVidia is using here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Scan.aspx?lang=en-us
Looks like a Java applet.

If the site animation is annoying to you, you may want to take it off completely as it may be annoying to site users?
I would suggest not building in extra code to stop the site from displaying as it should, in some cases users of the site may be running terminal services themselves (creating a point of failure)
If the animation is some kind of intro you could have a "skip" feature that switches it off an use a cookie as you mention.