iMacros

» see imacros.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The idea is almost too simple to patent. A browser is a program that receives clicks, so record the clicks. Mathias Roth built the first version in 2001 at iOpus Software GmbH, a small firm in Walldorf, Germany, and what came out was the first macro recorder designed for a web browser instead of for a desktop application. You pressed record, did the thing once, and got back a file of plain-text commands that you could edit by hand or pass to somebody else.

Two audiences found it and they barely overlapped. Companies bought the commercial editions for web testing and data extraction, and the expensive tier could drive Flash and Java applets by recognizing what was on screen rather than by reading the page source, which in 2008 was close to magic. Everyone else used the free Firefox extension to skip the tedious parts of the web: the same login every morning, the same eleven-field form that wanted your address again.

The ownership chain is where the story turns. Ipswitch acquired iOpus in April 2012 and folded iMacros into its network management division. Progress Software acquired Ipswitch in 2019 and inherited it. By then the web had moved out from under the product. JavaScript execution had already been pulled from the browser extensions, the Firefox extension model had been rebuilt from scratch in a way the old add-on could not follow, and users who wanted the original behavior were staying on Pale Moon, a fork of a Firefox version that was years old.

Progress published the wind-down in 2022 and gave it long notice by the standards of this site. Sales to new customers stopped on 30 November 2022, existing customers could buy extra seats until 30 October 2023, maintenance renewals ended on 20 November 2023, and the product reached end of life on 30 November 2023. Roth had already gone back to the idea: in 2020 he started Ui.Vision, an open-source replacement built on the visual-recognition side of what iMacros used to do.

~ the dossier ~

~ the category it invented ~

What iMacros was doing in 2001 has a name now and the name is robotic process automation. The enterprise version of that idea is sold today by companies with multibillion-dollar valuations, and the pitch is identical to the one on the iOpus site twenty-five years ago: your staff are clicking the same buttons in the same order every morning, so let a program do it. The difference is who was allowed to hold it. iMacros gave a working macro recorder to anyone with a browser, free, and the file it produced was readable text that you could open in Notepad and understand. The modern versions of the same idea arrive as a licensed platform with a services contract and a consultant attached.

~ browser-era software ~

This was engineer-adjacent software and the category was mine even if the product was not always the one in reach. Anyone who ran Firefox with a row of extensions in the 2000s had a drawer of things like this, sitting beside Firebug and whatever download manager was current, all of them solving the problem of a web that expected you to click the same thing forever. iMacros was the one that solved it for people who were not going to write a script, and that is a larger group than anybody building automation tools remembers.

iMacros belonged to a generation of tools that lived inside the browser and died with the browser generation that hosted them. Firebug, Greasemonkey, the toolbar ecosystem, the whole XUL add-on world: all of it assumed an extension could reach into the page and into the browser itself with very few limits. That assumption was what made these tools powerful and it is exactly what the modern extension permission model was built to end.

Firefox's Quantum rewrite in 2017 was the cutoff. Add-ons that had been maintained for a decade stopped working in one release, and the ones that survived were rewritten into something smaller. iMacros kept shipping extensions after that, but the version people actually wanted was the old one, which is why its remaining users ended up on a fork of a browser nobody else was running.

~ the redirect chain ~

The domain still redirects, and the chain is worth following because of where it stops. imacros.net hands you to progress.com/imacros, which hands you to the Progress customer community, which returns a 404 inside a 400 KB page that spends most of its weight rendering an error. The forum, twenty-odd years of macros people had written for each other, went with it and now lands on the same 404. demo.imacros.net, the test-page sandbox the documentation pointed at for two decades, refuses the connection outright. Ui.Vision, the open-source successor Roth started in 2020, is the only address in this story that still serves a working page.

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