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Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

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Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#61

Post by camus2 »

danidiaz wrote: post #19

Test recorders are an antipattern. They lure you with their "no programming required!" siren call, but the generated scripts invaribly end up as a fragile, poorly abstracted mess. GUI tests suites, especially those created with recorders, are prone to become unmaintainable beasts full of flaky tests. This old interview with Bret Pettichord makes good points about the use of recorders: https://youtu.be/s_CUPs6xAWw?t=5…

> Test recorders are an antipattern.

Selenium IDE is a useful tool for QA and a lot of user use case. Can people stop calling anything they don't like "antipattern"? All tools are useful when used correctly. Anything can be "an anti pattern" when used incorrectly.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#62

Post by simonstewart »

dbrgn wrote: post #46
jph wrote: post #10

Selenium IDE is a tremendous help for projects that want integration testing, and want to enable any team member to write ballpark tests. Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours. For example, my team took an existing web app with no tests, and had the project manager and junior business analysis go through the entire app with the Selenium IDE, writing tests. This enabled our dev team to start coding fast…

If you say that "Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours", why not convince your company to donate 10% of the money saved back to Selenium, so that they maybe have the resources to actually pay someone to continue development of these useful tools?

I think that there are plenty of reasons for companies not to contribute. Not many companies have spare engineering capacity for working on OSS. Of those that do, they have to choose where to spend the effort --- testing tools aren't as exciting as Machine Learning, or the latest JS framework, or.... Of course, once you start hacking on the code, you may find you like it a lot. :)

The IDE is a mature, and old product too, so even if engineers can spend time hacking on it, getting up to speed can be tricky. The Selenium project has an active "selenium-developers" google group, a #selenium IRC channel on freenode, and a Slack channel, where many of the core team can be found.

Which is a long way of saying that it's not always easy for even motivated individuals and companies to contribute to OSS.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#63

Post by 4c2383f5c88e911 »

walterbell wrote: post #47
sweep3r wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Using a fork is also bonkers. I don't trust the security of my web browsing on a fork. Most people won't, either. So Firefox will just get this nice metric saying "most people have not moved to a fork" and will be able to pat themselves in the back. But it's bogus.

Forks (or old versions of Firefox + extensions) can be run in isolated VMs on platforms like Qubes.

That's kind of a moot point when your browser handles most of your online interactions (and therefore a good chunk of your online identity, which is quite valuable to most people). Even if you isolate it as much as you can, which is a good thing to do in any case, it can still do a lot of damage without escaping the sandbox.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#66

Post by blubb-fish »

We (ab)use Selenium on headless Linux servers for task automation where no API is available. I hope this isn't affected - otherwise I'll have to `sudo apt-mark hold firefox`.

Suggestions for alternative software for this purpose?

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#68

Post by simonstewart »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #3

I wonder if there's anyone here from SauceLabs or or any other company that does browser automation as a service -- was this easy to see coming? Is everything pants-on-fire there at the moment?

We knew this was coming down the track, but the selenium project lacked the people to prevent it from happening.

Sauce Labs donated Selenium Builder (nee Sauce Builder) to the project to try and help. Applitools have recently leant some engineering muscle to the problem. The problem breaks down into two main areas:

* Technical: the underpinnings have switched from the XPI model to Web Components. Mozilla are doing what they think is best for their browser, and I know that they make their choices with thought and data.

* People: every successful OSS project has a company or person acting as its champion. The selenium project has people working flat out for the language bindings, the w3c "WebDriver" spec, grid, and supporting the community. We lack a champion with the time to spend on IDE.

We can fix the technical side of things. The thing that we could really do help with is the people-side....

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#69

Post by nindalf »

sethhochberg wrote: post #52
Grue3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason to use Firefox is because many of its extensions are not possible in any other browser . Watch the market share drop after the extensions are dumbed down to Chrome level.

I dunno - I'm a very technical user and I use a pretty vanilla Firefox mostly just because I like/trust Mozilla and don't want to support the web becoming a Webkit / Chrome monoculture. The only addon I use is LastPass. They support the new extension format just fine. I'm looking forward to the architectural changes coming in Servo, etc, which WebExtensions help make possible. I can't be the only user like me.

Ditto here. I use Firefox exclusively and all of my extensions are supported - OneTab, ublock origin, Lastpass. I fail to understand the narrative of "the only thing keeping FF alive is the handful of extensions that can't be ported to Chrome". I don't think the extension API is where this battle will be fought anyway. Performance and reliability are what users care about - is the browser fast to open, are pages fast to load, is it making other apps slow (memory and CPU consumption), how many tabs can I keep open, does it hang, does it crash, does any website fail to load/misbehave?

I'm confident Firefox will outstrip Chrome in these areas in the next year or so. But if it doesn't... it will die a slow death and the people on HN will assure us it was because NoScript didn't work anymore.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#70

Post by walterbell »

4c2383f5c88e911 wrote: post #63
walterbell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forks (or old versions of Firefox + extensions) can be run in isolated VMs on platforms like Qubes.

That's kind of a moot point when your browser handles most of your online interactions (and therefore a good chunk of your online identity, which is quite valuable to most people). Even if you isolate it as much as you can, which is a good thing to do in any case, it can still do a lot of damage without escaping the sandbox.

Yes, usage of isolated browser instances should be restricted to information within a single context or risk profile. E.g. a stateless, frequently rebooted VM for occasional use of a particular extension. Or a Bromium micro-VM for each tab, redirect, etc.
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