CustomFirefoxProfile

Introduction

The default Firefox profile is not very automation friendly, and thus SeleniumLibrary 2.5 and newer use a customized profile by default. Instructions below also explain how to create your own custom profile and how to take it into use. One good use case for a custom profile is handling self-signed certificates.

Profile distributed with SeleniumLibrary

Starting from SeleniumLibrary 2.5, the library itself ships a custom Firefox profile that it uses by default. This profile turns both the offline mode and proxy off (how to do that yourself is explained below), and it also removes unnecessary toolbars and other clutter from the user interface. The profile files are contained in the installation in <installation-path>/SeleniumLibrary/firefoxprofile and they can also be viewed online.

If you have ideas for further customization, please submit an enhancement request.

Creating custom profile

Execute command firefox -ProfileManager on the command line and choose a sane directory for the profile. Notice that you cannot have Firefox running when you run this command.

This page, and many others, contains lots of useful customizations. Here are a couple of additional ones that have been found useful:

• Enable running tests on localhost even when network is not available (works only with Firefox 3.6 and newer):
  • Open about:config using the test profile
  • Right click and choose New | Boolean
  • Enter network.manage-offline-status as name and set value to false
• Force proxy off:
  • Open about:config using the test profile
  • Right click and choose New | Integer
  • Enter "network.proxy.type" as name and set value to 3

After the profile has been created, there are bunch of files (and some subdirectories) in the custom profile directory. Most of the important content is in prefs.js, and view related content such as visible toolbars are stored in localstore.rdf. All other files and subdirectories can be removed. This is useful if you want to put the profile in version control, for example.

Taking custom profile into use

The Firefox profile to use must configured using -firefoxProfileTemplate option given to Selenium Server when it is started. For example, if you use Start Selenium Server keyword provided by the library, you need to use something like this:

Start Selenium Server	-firefoxProfileTemplate	/path/to/the/profile

When using SeleniumLibrary to start up the Selenium Server, this option also overrides the profile distributed with the library. If you start the Selenium Server otherwise, setting the custom profile is always on your responsibility.

If you want to use the default Firefox profile on your machine instead of the one distributed with the library, but do not want to create a custom profile yourself, you need to use a special value DEFAULT with the -firefoxProfileTemplate option. This should not be needed unless you have done customization to your machine's default profile.

Start Selenium Server	-firefoxProfileTemplate	DEFAULT