Switch between Google Chrome Tabs using AppleScript

Question

I was hoping that the following code would do the job, but no cigar:

--Only the window is brought into focus
tell application "Google Chrome"
    activate tab 1 of window 1
end tell

Answer 1

Google Chrome is, in fact, scriptable.

tell application "Google Chrome" to set active tab index of first window to 3

Works like a charm for version 10.0.648.204.

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While it would be nice to do something like the following:

tell application "Google Chrome" to set active tab of first window 
    to first tab of the first window whose title is "Super User"

It's not possible, since active tab is a read-only property. You'd need to loop over all a window's tabs to find the index of the one you want by querying each tab's title, and then set the active tab index:

tell application "Google Chrome"
    set i to 0
    repeat with t in (tabs of (first window whose index is 1))
        set i to i + 1
        if title of t is "Super User" then
            set (active tab index of (first window whose index is 1)) to i
        end if
    end repeat
end tell

Answer 2

Google Chrome isn't scriptable (that is, it doesn't understand Apple Events). You can script it the hard way using the Accessibility API (which you need to turn on in System Preferences > System > Universal Access; see the "Enable access for assistive devices" checkbox at the bottom); this is done via the Processes suite of System Events. Unfortunately, this is extremely painful in the general case, but something like

tell application "System Events"
    tell application process "Google Chrome"
        click tab 1 of window 1
    end tell
end tell

might suffice. If it doesn't, then you'll need to explicitly dig the tab element out of the widget tree; Apple has some sample code that can help you find UI elements.