I've recently started using watir-webdriver and so far am a big fan. However I need to be able to test Safari too, and I don't have access to a mac to be able to use Safari-Watir.
Does anyone know a good alternative to use for testing Safari on a windows machine? (In Ruby of course)
Thanks
(important, see UPDATE below)
the Selenium Webdriver folks are apparently waiting for something from Apple in order to support safari. I would not hold your breath.
Apple does have a version of Safari for the PC, I'm not sure how good the current version is, the initial releases were.. um, well, lets just say they had issues (lots of issues)
Personally (mostly for security reasons) I would not run it nor recommend anyone use it for any purpose other than downloading Chrome or Firefox. But unfortunately a lot of apple users use it because it's what came with their systems, which means to the extent apple users are part of your target market, you have to test on it.
For the moment that means you'll need to use Safariwatir, which has not as far as I can tell had an update for a year or more.
the current state of support on both the Selenium/Webdriver side and the Safariwatir side was discussed recently in this thread in the watir general group on google
UPDATE
Webdriver now has Safari support, which makes direct support of safari (I think on a mac only at this point) possible. See http://watirmelon.com/2012/04/17/using-watir-webdriver-with-safari-at-last/ for more info.. still a bit DYI but I'm sure it will get more accessable soon.
Mike, seems this is available now. Alister Scott wrote up some instructions on his blog Using Watir-Webdriver with Safari At Last
Unfortunately this still a bit DYI because you have to build your own safari extension, which requires getting certificates and such from apple, and I'm not sure if you can create the right environment to build that stuff on anything other than a mac.
Related
I am working on a XUL desktop application, where I use the browser tag and load a URL in that tag within the desktop application.
However, some websites display as old format and according to Mozilla, XUL is deprecated and will not be useable at the end of 2017. I want to build the application with the latest technology: WebExtensions.
I have searched many examples on the usage of WebExtensions, but all are working within the browser. Can I make a standalone desktop application just like XUL, but using WebExtensions?
If yes, then please give me some hints on how to get started.
If no, is any alternative for the same requirement available?
Webextensions are fairly limited in their scope. Even if there was an application runtime utilising them, you probably wouldn't get much use out of them due to the restrictive isolation from the host system.
Strictly speaking not webextensions, albeit very similar:
The Electron framework/runtime*
Someone at Mozilla is also working on an alternative dubbed "Positron"** though that software's future is uncertain and there is a chance he might abandon it for an entirely new, highly simplified project (at least that's what I gathered from my conversation with him on Github).
*http://electron.atom.io/
**https://github.com/mozilla/positron
I just installed Firefox on a new computer running Windows 8.1.
I usually use Chrome but recently I've been redesigning my website and today I tried loading it on multiple browsers to see if there were any problems.
It's a Flash games site with lots of flash ads. So when I went to my site in the new Firefox browser, I was surprised to see a lot of "plugin needed" boxes.
I tried loads of sites, and it became apparent that flash was not installed in the firefox browser at all. No Flash was loading.
Bizarrely, the grey box telling me I needed a plugin didn't give me any hint as to what plugin I needed, provided no link, and even blocked the fail-safe link to adobe that is displayed if flashplayer is not installed when using swfobject.js.
I tried searching for the flash player update in the firefox add-ons - nothing.
I tried searching on google and downloaded the general flash player update (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) - installed it and nothing changed.
Eventually after 20 minutes of searching, I found this obscure page on Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html
I downloaded and ran the exe for 'Plugin-based browsers' and this worked.
It appears the latest version of Firefox has deliberately not included Flash Player, which is utterly mad if that's really true.
However, I can't find any discussion or documentation that this is the case. But then why wasn't it included in my version?
Does anybody know anything about this?
Firefox has never included Flash, you always need to go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer and download the Flash Plugin on your first install of Firefox. Make sure that you turn on autoupdate for Flash by using the Flash cpanel app in your Windows Control Panel. Then check regularly to make sure Flash is still autoupdating. It can have a bad habit of failing.
It's only recently that Microsoft includes Flash and only on IE on Windows 8+ as a copy of Google's attempt to increase Flash security by including it in Chrome some time back. IE gets its Flash updates through Windows Update when Microsoft gets the patches applied.
Google is the 800lb gorilla that gets what it wants and twisted Adobe's arm to force them to supply Flash code so they can do their own updates via their Pepper Flash module which updates when Chrome autoupdates.
While Mozilla will warn you that Flash is out of date, they do not have the monetary clout like huge corporations (Microsoft, Google) to force Adobe to give them source code so they can fix Adobe's security sieve as it happens.
Mozilla has chosen to promote HTML5 and open DRM to hurry the eventual demise of a piece of Macromedia Legacy web extensions that has been plaguing us with serious zero day exploits (Jan-Feb 2015 most recent) that often appear back-to-back and often get 2 try patch releases in the hope that it gets fixed.
And in that same timeframe, often Chrome and Windows 8 versions of IE have a similar lag to bug fix, though a lot quicker than Adobe.
Get in the habit manually checking Chrome's version, Chrome can suffer update failure despite its automatic update feature.
I'm at my wits end right now trying to get a website working in IE7-9, the issue I'm having is getting text-shadow to appear in a decent matter. I've been using the 960 grid system so changes are very minimum, I've been checking changes with IE Netrender. However lately IE Netrender has been having issues so I can't test the layout in a timely fashion.
I did have VM Ware set up but I'm really tired of reactivating my Windows copy and installing a separate image for each version of the browser. I don't have Windows 7 for IE9 as well. I'm looking for a free option. I've tried searching but everything seems outdated.
So my question is, how does everyone test their site for IE7-9?
The IE Developer Tools let you set IE7 and IE8 modes on IE9, so you can get 98% testing with one version.
There are some issues that don't crop up there though, so its a good idea to do a quick real browser check at the end.
MS has free VMs you can download with the different versions of IE on them. I'm not sure if you can run them on a Mac though.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575
By having a Windows license. Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but there's no such thing as a free meal. The only truly guaranteed method of testing a site in Internet Explorer is to actually use it in Internet Explorer, be it in a virtual machine or on a real PC. Spoon used to have an Internet Explorer virtualization web app, but that has since been removed at Microsoft's behest.
I recently started using the Dojo firebug extension. I had gotten used to it since it had some nice features (letting you see dojo on the widget level). This was good for me because I am in the process of trying to learn dojo so this really let me see how stuff worked together.
My question is, has anyone found any solutions to get the Dojo firebug extension working in Firefox 6 or should I just try downgrading to FF5?
Thanks
UPDATE:
I tried a workaround I found somewhere else. It said to use the Firefox nightly build add-on, and that add-on would allow me to override the version compatibility. I tried that and it still didn't work.
I recommend trying the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension from Mozilla. This extension (besides letting you report incompatible add-ons) lets you completely disable version checking.
It's a great way to ensure that older extensions still work when Firefox upgrades the browser every week. Now, this assumes that the issue is with version compatibility, and not that the plugin is actually broken! If it's the latter, there's not much else you can do.
(Also, that's an awesome plugin. I'm definitely going to try it out myself here shortly!)
I don't use a mac much so my exposure is minimal but can I safely presume that IE on the Mac is dead?
I know that Microsoft isn't developing it any further and that Firefox, Safari (Opera and Camino) all run on Mac (and from my stats they are most used, in that order)...
So the question is: Is it dead? and if so, when did it die?
I still see CSS templates with Mac IE hacks in place... but I'm thinking it is time to strip the dead weight. Am I right?
PS For anyone hosting a large commercial site, I'd be interested in the % of customers using Mac IE. (Customers being users that actually buy something, not just web developers ping'ing amazon.com to see what it looks like)
It's dead. I just pulled up this months report and found 9 hits out of 3.5 million (about 0.0000257%).
If you need a time-of-death, I would say it was in 2006 when Microsoft released a statement urging users to "migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari."
Yes. Praise the lord.
Please refer to this document.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/
The highest version of Mac IE shipped was 5.2.3.
And this for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5#Apple_Macintosh
HTH
Colby Africa
I would consider IE on the Mac as dead.
As a long year Mac user, I think nobody really uses this browser often.
According to this statistics http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm the usage percentage is under 0.3%.
I used to work for a large commercial site just over a year ago, and IE5.5 on a Mac usage was below 0.5% - and that was in an organisation where many of the internal users used that browser (the main reason we had to support it)
I would say, unless the demographic you are targeting are especially likely to be using it, I really wouldn't bother.
I'm seeing 0.22% usage of IE on mac. So, I'd consider it dead too. I'm also only seeing .23% on Opera.
22 hits on a monthly visits count of 10,025.
I really liked Mac IE back in the day, and still consider it one of the best browsers for old-school modem surfers and that it contains features still not replicated elsewhere.
Still, by the time Safari 2 came out Mac IE was way too long in the tooth, never updated and didn't match the slowly-evolving Aqua look and feel anymore. The last few faithful users gave up on it.
It died around the time os x came out. I havnt seen it been used in years and i would say its safe to assume its not being used any more. I dont think it got ported to be a native os x app and the newer os x versions cant run non native apps.