While the techniques described here allow you to extract information from websites that are otherwise untouchable, these techniques also suffer from a few disadvantages. Here are a few things I’ve learned that may save you some time and grief as you develop your own iMacros solutions:
Designate Firefox, or your browser of choice for the iMacros environment, as the default browser on your computer and don’t use this browser for anything else. Doing so ensures that iMacros is launched in the correct browser and that the browser is not simultaneously used for another purpose.
Understand that multiple iMacros scripts cannot execute simultaneously on the same desktop account. If you schedule multiple iMacros sessions on a single computer, ensure that they don’t overlap because any new session will automatically terminate any session that is already open. If you need to execute multiple browser simulations at the same time, be sure that they are running on different user accounts so they don’t interfere with each other.
If your macros log into secure websites, your macros may contain usernames and passwords in clear text. This is a bad practice. Before performing such antics, explore iMacro’s ability to encrypt login credentials.
Find examples in your own life where you need to integrate data sources (databases or external web resources) with websites that make extensive use of Javascript and are not candidates for traditional webbot or screen scraper scripts.
When you read the next chapter, on deployment and scaling, think about how you would scale a webbot or a botnet that is based on browser macros.
At the time of this book’s publication, iMacros for Internet Explorer does not support tab functions.