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Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

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Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#81
There seems to be a certain amount of confusion on this thread, so just to be sure that it's clear, Selenium itself will continue to work with future releases of Firefox. This means that existing WebDriver-based browser automation remains compatible with with Firefox 55+. SauceLabs', and other testing-infrastructure-as-a-service providers' support for Firefox will be unchanged. The only thing that will stop working is the Selenium IDE which is a XUL extension that allows writing selenium tests without writing any code. This is undoubtedly useful to some people, but as the original post says, there are alternatives in development that are targetting a similar niche, so the situation is not as dire as the title implies (I imagine the title is worded this way to reduce the number of duplicate bug reports that the Selenium owners have to wade through on the subject of Firefox 55+ compat. for IDE).

To expand further on Mozilla's ongoing commitment to WebDriver, we employ one of the editors of the WebDriver specification [1], are making significant contributions to the WebDriver testsuite, and are actively working on our geckodriver implementation to ensure that we have a fully-featured standards-complaint implementation as soon as possible. I also know that other vendors are working on improving the spec compatibility of their implementations, so I think the future of WebDriver is very promising, with fewer differences between drivers that aren't the result of fundamental differences in the browsers under test.

[1] https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#82

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?

Selenium will continue working, and is actively supported by Mozilla. The IDE (the plugin that allowed UI-based recording of tests) is the only thing that's not working.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#84

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…

Disagree 51%. Recording tests works well and saves tons of time in specific scenarios. It works especially well for "throw away" test cases that you need only for a few days, for example during development of a specific feature. So I consider your statement way too black and white.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#85
I'm getting the impression that a lot of extension developers are not just complaining about these changes but also making the decision to shut down their development. Feels like it could be pretty bad news for Firefox.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#86

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 at http://www.trinityradar.com/ provide browser automation service. We stopped working with Firefox a few months ago since less and less people are using firefox now. We run chrome browser on cloud. Full disclosure: I work for Trinity Radar.

But that has nothing to do with the IDE no longer being available, but merely as a cost-saver for you guys (I presume).

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#87

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?

Note that SauceLabs, Browserstack etc. will continue to work. This was just an extension that allowed you to create tests by click through your website rather than writing them by hand. Resulted in far brittler tests, but useful to some apparently.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#88
In the last hours since submitting this link to HN, I started using the Selenium IDE made by Kantu:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto...

It works well for what it does and covers basic recording/replay for the core commands. But it is a new project, and by no means a full replacement yet. Code on Github (GPL license).

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#89
post #36
post #11

This is what is going to happen to most extensions. Mozilla is bonkers, doing this. They're going to regret it.

Only about 20% of Firefox add-ons have been converted to WebExtension format. One of the headaches is that access to local storage is asynchronous (in the "promise" sense) in WebExtensions. As a result, if you want something based on stored data such as a stored script or a blocklist to happen early, during page load, you can't get it to run soon enough. This breaks Greasemonkey[1] and NoScript.[2] WebExtensions need…

The 20% figure doesn't say that much - you'd need to know how many of the extensions used most often are ported. I can very much imagine there being a long tail of extensions that nobody uses.

Also take into account how many Chrome extensions are ported over now that it's easy. For example, the only extension I use that won't get ported over is VimFx, but Vimium has now become available which does exactly the things I used VimFx for.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#90

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?

Selenium will continue working, and is actively supported by Mozilla. The IDE (the plugin that allowed UI-based recording of tests) is the only thing that's not working.

sure - but this might very well indicate a trend.
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