Space Vatican

Ramblings of a curious coder

Selenium and Firefox 3

I recently spent a bit of time making our Selenium tests play nicely with Firefox 3 and spent quite a lot of time starting at

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Preparing Firefox profile...

Selenium would launch Firefox, and then Firefox would just sit there doing nothing. Eventually some digging around found a ticket on the Selenium issue tracker. It turns out Selenium installs a tiny little extension into the Firefox profiles it generates that basically just lets selenium kill firefox by telling it to go to a magic chrome url. Firefox extensions specify which versions they are compatible with and the one embedded in selenium had 2.0.0.* as their maximum version (and this is still the case with the latest downloadable release (although you could of course download the nightly builds)).

It seems that this was the only thing from keeping selenium and Firefox 3 playing nicely together as changing the maximum version to 3.0.* got all our tests passing again with our existing version of selenium (0.9.2).

All I had to do was extract the relevant files from selenium-server.jar:

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jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/\{503A0CD4-EDC8-489b-853B-19E0BAA8F0A4\}/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/readystate\@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/\{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4\}/install.rdf

This extracts the files (and the directory structure containing them). To be honest I’m not entirely sure of the difference between all of these extensions - safest bet seems to be changing them all. Now edit all of the .rdf files (they’re just text files) and change the maximum version from 2.0.0. to whatever you want (for example 3.0.) and put them back in the jar:

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jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/\{503A0CD4-EDC8-489b-853B-19E0BAA8F0A4\}/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/readystate\@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/\{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4\}/install.rdf

Voila! all done