Selenium RC 1.0.1 support for Firefox 3.6 February 1, 2010 Tweet

LATEST UPDATE (Jan 2010): We now have Firefox 4 in beta and you will face the same issue again. You might want to follow the instructions for patching Selenium server 1.x to support Firefox 4.

• Firefox 3.6
• Snow Leopard

If you are looking for instructions to download and setup the latest Selenium RC release, look here.

A lot of people are having trouble with selenium and firefox 3.6. Here I have described the steps to first ensure that the problem you are seeing is due to the lack of selenium’s support for your browser version and then steps to patch the selenium-server.jar to make it work with Firefox 3.6.

Testing Selenium server support for Firefox

The quickest way to test if your selenium server is supporting the Firefox version installed on your machine is to start selenium server in an interactive mode. Let us walk through these steps.

1. Run Selenium server in interactive mode. To do this run the command:
   java -jar selenium-server.jar -interactive -singleWindow
2. Start new selenium browser session using the command:
   cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*firefox&2=http://www.google.com
3. If you see a line saying Preparing Firefox profile... and no progress beyond that, there is a high likelihood that the Firefox browser version you have is not supported by your version of selenium server jar you have. If you have Firefox 3.6 and selenium 1.0.1, the next section shows how to fix the problem.
4. If you don’t see a problem, run the following command:
   cmd=open&1=http://www.google.com

If the browser starts and you see Google’s home page in it, your basic setup seems to be fine.

Patching Selenium server to support Firefox 3.6

These steps should work for you on Unix, Mac or cygwin on windows. In case you are not using any of these, you would need to figure out the corresponding steps for our platform.

1. Create a directory where you could manipulate the jar’s contents.
   cd ~/selenium101
2. Copy your selenium-server.jar file in the newly created directory and cd into it.
   cp selenium-server.jar ~/selenium101/.
cd ~/selenium101
3. Unzip the jar files contents here and delete the jar file.
   unzip selenium-server.jar
rm selenium-server.jar
4. First find all the *.rdf files – you should see 5 of them:
   find . -name "*.rdf"
./customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
./customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf
./customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{503A0CD4-EDC8-489b-853B-19E0BAA8F0A4}/install.rdf
./customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
./customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf

5. In each of these files you will see
   <em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>
   Change them to
   <em:maxVersion>3.6.*</em:maxVersion>
6. all the files are now patched. To jar them back up run the following steps:
   zip -r selenium-server *
mv selenium-server.zip selenium-server.jar

Rerun the browser tests as described earlier. Selenium should now be able to instantiate a new browser and drive it.