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Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

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Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#91
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is not how capitalism works

Except when it is.

Investing resources is great marketing, trains your developers if they're working on it and gains you influence to improve the parts you need improved.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#92
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to get an other datapoint: we used to build tests for selenium with selenium ide too, but quickly found out that the used selectors for the elements often had to be manually tweaked, and so we switched to http://nightwatchjs.org/ for our tests, and write them by hand. Tests are more reliable now, and devs are happy with it. Based on my (limited) experience, selenium ide is not something that is absolutely needed…

Are these E2E tests robust? I found they often break easily

Yes they work. The only thing you have to watch out for is the timing for the assertions with

    .waitForElementVisible('[name="main"]', 10000)

otherwise you sometimes check for a value in a field, but the field is not there yet, and the test fails.

That's the only gotcha we found we have to be careful about.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#93

Wow, that's really sad to hear! I wonder if, instead of abandoning the project, they could put together a patron sponsorship to fund further development? I'm sure there are plenty of companies out there that rely on firefox and selenium and would be more than happy to help contribute?

> rely on firefox and selenium

... but not the IDE, which is what is being abandoned. Most people don't use the IDE, or use it for a bit before they learn how to do things manually (coders like to code).

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#94
post #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).

This extension uses the Webapi... so I assume it can be "backported" to Firefox?

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#95
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.

Only reason? I use Firefox because it's way faster, more stable, and from an organization that I trust. I run Nightly, which means that I made the shift to Webextensions last week. My only extension that didn't have a WE version or alternative was LastPass. No surprise, since they seem to take such poor care of their extensions anyway. That's a Deal Breaker for me, so I switched to pass.

Same here... Firefox remains my default browser for its indepence. And it is great to see it improve. Once they catch up with the Webapi I hope they keep expanding it beyond a Chrome copy.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#96
post #11

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

> Mozilla is bonkers, doing this.

No they are not. Anyone who has done (or tried to do) any cross-browser extension development will attest that working with Chrome-style apis is so much faster than trying to make sense of XUL. Look at how many new extensions start life as Chrome-only these days. Chrome did to Firefox what Firefox did to IE - which had an extension mechanism that required C++ (!). Ease of development always wins, because humans are lazy. Mozilla tried for years (and failed) to match that ease of development, and then decided XUL is not a hill worth dying on - especially considering how it also held back a lot of performance-related improvements.

As others have said, it will hurt but it's worth doing if the browser is to survive. It would have probably come sooner had it not been for the FFOS distraction. Once the ecosystem is fully rebased on webextensions, then Mozilla can try an embrace-and-extinguish play if they really want to.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is totally impractical, or people would be already doing this when using other browsers as a defense in depth thing.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

who on earth is downvoting my comments and why?

when the developers involved with Selenium suddenly decide to just drop a browser for one of their sub-projects then this might very well indicate a trend - even if it's just that firefox is less actively supported in future.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#99
post #4

I'd be curious to see what the usage stats on the IDE are; my company (Mozilla, ironically) uses Selenium a ton, but as far as I know we write all of our tests by hand instead of with the IDE since it allows you to use patterns like Page objects to make your tests more maintainable in the long run. Although the last time I used the IDE was years ago, so it may be more flexible than it used to be. Does anyone extensiv…

I didn't know this existed. I always write the tests in JS using .click() .focus() etc.

Re: Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure - but this might very well indicate a trend.

who on earth is downvoting my comments and why? when the developers involved with Selenium suddenly decide to just drop a browser for one of their sub-projects then this might very well indicate a trend - even if it's just that firefox is less actively supported in future.

https://xkcd.com/605/
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