What profile does Selenium WebDriver use by default? - firefox

Question

Where does Selenium WebDriver (a.k.a Selenium 2) get the anonymous profile that it uses when it opens FirefoxDriver? If it used the default for Firefox, %appdata%/roaming/mozilla/firefox/profiles, then if I were to disable a firefox plugin, it should be disabled for Selenium WebDriver also, so why isn't it?

Answer 1

I will answer it, supporting comment from #twall: When starting firefox in Selenium 2 WebDriver, it starts new, anonymous profile.
However, if you want to change it, you can create new Firefox profile and name it somehow, you know what it is - e.g. SELENIUM
Then in your code do this:
ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile ffprofile = profile.getProfile("SELENIUM");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffprofile);
That way, Firefox will always start that profile. In the profile you do all the settings you need

Answer 2

You can assign to each Selenium grid 2 node a specific firefox profile:
java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.37.0.jar
-Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=my-profile -role node -hub http://example-server.org:4444/grid/register
Notice that the value of the webdriver.firefox.profile has to be the firefox profile name, not the location or the folder name

Answer 3

When running webdriver on a test server with no options to create profiles on the machine you can create your profile programmatically:
private FirefoxProfile GetFirefoxProfile()
{
FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
firefoxProfile.SetPreference("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "http://localhost");
return firefoxProfile;
}

Answer 4

Fetching a profile is not useful as it is internally creating another copy of the fetched named profile. Accessing the original profile is required if
for eg: test coverage data should be written to a data store across multiple invocations.
Here is a possible solution by Overriding the ProfilesIni class of Selenium
Start by creating a Custom profile using firefox -p, say "CustomSeleniumProfile"
ProfilesIni profileini = new ProfilesIni() {
#Override
public FirefoxProfile getProfile(String profileName) {
File appData = locateAppDataDirectory(Platform.getCurrent());
Map<String, File> profiles = readProfiles(appData);
File profileDir = profiles.get(profileName);
if (profileDir == null)
return null;
return new FirefoxProfile(profileDir);
}
};
FirefoxProfile profile = profileini.getProfile("CustomSeleniumProfile");
//profile.setEnableNativeEvents(false);
driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);
//ffDriver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
driver.get("http://www.google.com");