Disable images in Selenium Python

Question

Because Webdriver waits for the entire page to load before going on to the next line, I think disabling images, css and javascript will speed things up.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_profile import FirefoxProfile

def disableImages(self):
    ## get the Firefox profile object
    firefoxProfile = FirefoxProfile()
    ## Disable CSS
    firefoxProfile.set_preference('permissions.default.stylesheet', 2)
    ## Disable images
    firefoxProfile.set_preference('permissions.default.image', 2)
    ## Disable Flash
    firefoxProfile.set_preference('dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libflashplayer.so',
                                      'false')
    ## Set the modified profile while creating the browser object 
    self.browserHandle = webdriver.Firefox(firefoxProfile)

I got the code from stackoverflow Do not want images to load and CSS to render on Firefox in Selenium WebDriver tests with Python

But when I add

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.stackoverflow.com/")

to the end, it still loads images :/

Answer 1

Unfortunately the option firefox_profile.set_preference('permissions.default.image', 2) will no longer work to disable images with the latest version of Firefox - [for reason see Alecxe's answer to my question Can't turn off images in Selenium / Firefox ]

The best solution i had was to use the firefox extension quickjava , which amongst other things can disable images- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/quickjava/

My Python code:

 from selenium import webdriver
 firefox_profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()

 firefox_profile.add_extension(folder_xpi_file_saved_in + "\\quickjava-2.0.6-fx.xpi")
 firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.curVersion", "2.0.6.1") ## Prevents loading the 'thank you for installing screen'
 firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Images", 2)  ## Turns images off
 firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.AnimatedImage", 2)  ## Turns animated images off

 driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile)
 driver.get(web_address_desired)

Other things can also be switched off by adding the lines:

  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.CSS", 2)  ## CSS
  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Cookies", 2)  ## Cookies
  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Flash", 2)  ## Flash
  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Java", 2)  ## Java
  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.JavaScript", 2)  ## JavaScript
  firefox_profile.set_preference("thatoneguydotnet.QuickJava.startupStatus.Silverlight", 2)  ## Silverlight

Answer 2

UPDATE: The answer might not work any longer since permissions.default.image became a frozen setting and cannot be changed. Please try with quickjava extension (link to the answer).

---

You need to pass firefox_profile instance to the webdriver constructor:

from selenium import webdriver

firefox_profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
firefox_profile.set_preference('permissions.default.stylesheet', 2)
firefox_profile.set_preference('permissions.default.image', 2)
firefox_profile.set_preference('dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libflashplayer.so', 'false')

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=firefox_profile)
driver.get('http://www.stackoverflow.com/')

driver.close()

And this is how it would be displayed: