Synchronizer

You mark one running profile as the leader and one or more as followers. All of them have to be open already, because the windows themselves are what is being driven.

Mirroring is only useful if you can watch it, so the windows you work in can be laid on one grid across the display your cursor is on. Each running profile takes one cell, and a profile started without a window is left out.

Five kinds of action leave the leading window. Everything else stays where you did it.

• Clicks

  The element under the pointer, plus where inside the window you hit.

• Typing

  The whole current value of a field, rather than a stream of keystrokes.

• Scrolling

  The page position, sent at a steady pace rather than on every wheel notch.

• Nine navigation keys

  Enter, Tab, Backspace, Delete, Escape and the four arrows.

• Address changes

  Navigation in the main frame, with blank and error pages never forwarded.

A captured click is not a pixel. It carries a short path down to the element you hit and the point you hit as two fractions of the window.

In each follower the path is tried first and the element is brought into view before it is clicked. That road survives a window of another size.

• The path finds the element

  It is scrolled into view and clicked, which is the case that survives different window sizes.

• The path finds nothing

  The fractions take over, resolved against that window's own width and height rather than the leader's.

• The follower just navigated

  It simply misses the action. A held action would land on a page you had already left.

A profile usually has more than one tab open. On ARMANOS Browser the pages themselves are asked which one is on screen, so the tab in front of you is the one that leads.

That answer is taken once, when you press start, and held for the whole session. On the built-in engine nothing is asked: there a profile is driven through the window it opened first, and with the start page on that window is the start page.

A synchronizer is for work you are doing anyway, once, with your eyes on it: the same banner in eight accounts, the same form, the same checkout.

A flow is for work you will do again. It costs more to write and far less to repeat, and it can be put on a timetable.

The listeners are detached, the queue inside the page is emptied and its name deleted, and what the engine switched on for the session is switched off.

Nothing about the session is written to disk. That is the honest half of the trade: what leaves no trace cannot be replayed tomorrow.