Regarding Gecko

[Aniket Mane]

Hi All,

I have a doubt regarding geckodriver,why they introduced geckodriver to initiate Firefox like chrome in latest 3.x beta versions?

yes owner of geckodriver is mozila foundation but without this driver was there any issues before(as a standalone firefox)?

[⇜Krishnan Mahadevan⇝]

Aniket,

The long term vision of Selenium project is to have the respective browser owners own the server component as well. Since they know the browsers more than anyone else, it makes more sense for them to build the server component [ the one that provides implementation to all the end-points as defined by the JSONWireProtocol/W3c specifications ].

That is why firefox is also moving towards leveraging the geckodriver which is supposed to be server component for firefox.

Yes without the driver there were no issues before. But it also meant that with every new version of firefox getting released [ firefox has a very aggressive release cycle ], selenium was forced to play the catch up game of doing a new release so that selenium works with the newly released firefox version as well.

Also I believe that there have been some other internal changes in firefox browser itself, which mandates that extensions be signed [ I don't know the details but you should be google it ]. The current implementation for firefox support relied on an embedded firefox webdriver plugin (xpi) which was extracted out from the selenium jar and used to support firefox automation. So that also was a motivating factor.

Thanks & Regards
Krishnan Mahadevan

"All the desirable things in life are either illegal, expensive, fattening or in love with someone else!"
My Scribblings @ http://wakened-cognition.blogspot.com/

My Technical Scribbings @ http://rationaleemotions.wordpress.com/

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[Aniket Mane]

Thanks a lot krishnan for your response

On Aug 7, 2016 7:23 PM, "⇜Krishnan Mahadevan⇝" <krishnan.ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Aniket,

The long term vision of Selenium project is to have the respective browser owners own the server component as well. Since they know the browsers more than anyone else, it makes more sense for them to build the server component [ the one that provides implementation to all the end-points as defined by the JSONWireProtocol/W3c specifications ].

That is why firefox is also moving towards leveraging the geckodriver which is supposed to be server component for firefox.

Yes without the driver there were no issues before. But it also meant that with every new version of firefox getting released [ firefox has a very aggressive release cycle ], selenium was forced to play the catch up game of doing a new release so that selenium works with the newly released firefox version as well.

Also I believe that there have been some other internal changes in firefox browser itself, which mandates that extensions be signed [ I don't know the details but you should be google it ]. The current implementation for firefox support relied on an embedded firefox webdriver plugin (xpi) which was extracted out from the selenium jar and used to support firefox automation. So that also was a motivating factor.

Thanks & Regards
Krishnan Mahadevan

"All the desirable things in life are either illegal, expensive, fattening or in love with someone else!"
My Scribblings @ http://wakened-cognition.blogspot.com/

My Technical Scribbings @ http://rationaleemotions.wordpress.com/

On Sun, Aug 7, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Aniket Mane <aniket...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I have a doubt regarding geckodriver,why they introduced geckodriver to initiate Firefox like chrome in latest 3.x beta versions?

yes owner of geckodriver is mozila foundation but without this driver was there any issues before(as a standalone firefox)?

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[Andreas Tolfsen]

In addition to what Krishnan says, there are also technical reasons
FirefoxDriver will cease working in the future.

FirefoxDriver is written as an add-on to Firefox, using its powerful
extension APIs. With Firefox 48, Mozilla is shipping two new features
that make it hard to continue with this approach.

The first feature is Electrolysis (e10s), which is the code name for
multiprocessing Firefox. This is the biggest architectural change in
Gecko for fifteen years; possibly since its conception. The current
FirefoxDriver code is fundamentally not compatible with multiprocessing
Firefox, and if you wanted to use it with modern Firefoxen you would
have to disable e10s. At some point in the future e10s will become
mandatory.

The second thing is add-on signing. All add-ons which are not signed
will not be allowed to be installed in Firefox for security reasons and
to guard users from exploitation. Because of FirefoxDriver’s nature,
it will realistically never be accepted as a signed add-on.

In practice this means that it _is_ possible to continue using
FirefoxDriver with Firefox 48 iff you disable e10s and use unbranded
builds. Unbranded builds (such as DevEdition, Nightly, or a custom
build you do yourself) do not enforce add-on signing.

For the time being, my suggestion is to continue testing with
FirefoxDriver and Firefox ESRs or 47.0.1.