Automatically logging advertising data from Ghostery plugin with Selenium?
Question: I'm interested in keeping an eye on which advertising networks are running on
a variety of websites. The [Ghostery](https://www.ghostery.com) browser plugin
does a great job of showing me which ad networks are used on any website. For
example, on StackOverflow, Ghostery says we're being monitored by DoubleClick,
Google Analytics, Quantcast, and ScoreCard.

On a weekly basis, I'd like to use Selenium to automatically browse few
hundred websites and save the Ghostery data associated with these websites.
Using the Python bindings for Selenium, I wrote out some rough pseudocode:

    
    
    import selenium.webdriver as webdriver
    urls = ['www.stackoverflow.com', 'www.amazon.com', ...]
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    for url in urls:
        driver.get(url)
        # now, how do I access Ghostery's analysis of this URL?
    

I suppose the broader question is "**from Selenium, how do I connect to other
browser plugins?** "

* * *

For fun, I posted an example of what Ghostery's UI looks like (which I'd like
to access programmatically):

![enter image description here](http://i.stack.imgur.com/NyFtd.png)


Answer: Selenium is used to access and interact with a browser's
[DOM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model). Selenium is not
able to access a browser's controls; it is a completely inappropriate tool for
what you want to accomplish.

