1208209 - Convert current selenium test scripts from using SeleniumRC to the newer Selenium::Remote::Driver

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: QA Test Scripts, enhancement)

Description

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Selenium WebDriver is the successor of Selenium Remote Control which has been officially deprecated. Our test scripts currently work at the moment, but in the future, Firefox may change in way that no longer works with SeleniumRC and we will have to migrate anyway. WebDriver is actively maintained, drives the browser natively and also adds additional features. WebDriver also overcomes the limitation of Selenium RC's Single Host origin policy.

Also we would no longer need to use selenium-standalone-X.XX.jar as we would talk to the browser directly.

Perl bindings:
https://github.com/gempesaw/Selenium-Remote-Driver
https://metacpan.org/release/Selenium-Remote-Driver

Downside: Major rewrite of our test scripts as the syntax is different and relies and WebObjects instead of CSS selectors.

Something I would want to do is to capture errors and store screenshots automatically for use by headless systems (Travis, Taskcluster, etc).

dkl

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

You will only do the conversion in master, right?

Comment 2

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to Frédéric Buclin from comment #1)
> You will only do the conversion in master, right?

That is correct. If Firefox stops working in the older branches for SeleniumRC we will worry about it then.

dkl

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

FYI, I wrote a test script using Selenium::Remote::Driver which doesn't depend on selenium-server-standalone-2.48.2.jar, and despite it's working fine with Firefox 41, it fails to start with Firefox 43:

prove -v test_simple.t 
test_simple.t .. Unable to connect to the /usr/local/bin/firefox binary on port 9090 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.20.1/Selenium/CanStartBinary.pm line 132.


Our current Selenium scripts based on WWW::Selenium have the same problem: they work fine with Firefox 41 but totally fail to start with Firefox 43.

Before we start converting our scripts to use Selenium::Remote::Driver, someone would have to find what's wrong with Firefox 43.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

Workaround for Firefox 43:

After Selenium::Remote::Driver is installed, edit Selenium/Firefox/webdriver_prefs.json and add

  "xpinstall.signatures.required": false

at the end of the "frozen" list.

From what I heard, this pref won't work in Firefox 44 anymore. We will have to move to Marionnette, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Marionette/WebDriver