Question:

I have a python program that opens several urls in seperate tabs in a new browser window, however when I run the program from the command line and open the browser using

webbrowser.open_new(url)

The stderr from firefox prints to bash. Looking at the docs I can't seem to find a way to redirect or suppress them

I have resorted to using

browserInstance = subprocess.Popen(['firefox'], stdout=log, stderr=log)

Where log is a tempfile & then opening the other tabs with webbrowser.open_new.

Is there a way to do this within the webbrowser module?

What is webbrowser.get() giving you?

If you do

webbrowser.get('firefox').open(url)

then you shouldn't see any output. The webbrowser module choses to leave stderr for some browsers - in particular the text browsers, and then ones where it isn't certain. For all UnixBrowsers that have set background to True, no output should be visible.

What about sending the output to /dev/null instead of a temporary file?

I think Martin is right about Unix systems, but it looks like things are different on Windows. Is this on a Windows system?

On Windows it looks like webbrowser.py is either going to give you a webbrowser.WindowsDefault browser, which opens the url using

os.startfile(url)

or if Firefox is present it's going to give you a webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser, which starts the browser on Windows using:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmdline)

It looks like only Unix browsers have the ability to redirect stderr in the webbrowser module. You should be able to find out what browser type you're getting by doing

>>> webbrowser.get('firefox')

In a Python interactive console.