Firefox Build does not work with Selenium

Question

for my research, I did some source code modifications in firefox and build it myself. In order to automate testing, I opted to use Selenium but unfortunately, my newly built Firefox seem to not support Selenium.

I did the following:

from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary  binary = FirefoxBinary("/path/to/firefox/binary")  d = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)  d.get("http://www.google.de") 

The Firefox does open and is responsive (I can enter a website in the search bar). But after a while, the python script crashes with the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "firefox.py", line 7, in <module>     d = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 59, in __init__     self.binary, timeout),   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.py", line 47, in __init__     self.binary.launch_browser(self.profile)   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 66, in launch_browser     self._wait_until_connectable()   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 109, in _wait_until_connectable     raise WebDriverException("Can't load the profile. Profile " selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Can't load the profile. Profile Dir: %s If you specified a log_file in the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details. 

I did google that error message and most solutions suggested, that I should Update Selenium since it does not support the Firefox version used. Unfortunately, I installed the newest version of selenium (2.44.0) and I even used an older version of firefox (version 33) to rule out that point.

I also made sure that my code modifications are not the reason for this to crash by building a clean, unmodified firefox. Selenium doesn't work with this firefox either.

If I don't specify a firefox binary and let Selenium use the installed Firefox, everything works fine. So my guess is, that something is wrong with the firefox build, which I did exactly as mentioned in the online documentation (e.g. ./mach build).

Has anyone an idea, what my mistake might be? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Some setup information:

• Firefox 33
• Selenium 2.44.0
• Python 3.4 (also tried 2.7, doesn't work either)
• Firefox build with Ubuntu 14.04

Answer 1

Ubuntu 14.04, firefox 36.0, selenium 2.44.0. The same problem, was solved by:

sudo pip install -U selenium 

Selenium 2.45.0 is OK with FF36.

update: Selenium 2.53+ is compatible with FF45

You can get older FF versions here

Answer 2

I have spent a long time debugging this and ultimately gave up trying to make incompatible versions of selenium/firefox work. I just don't have the expertise in firefox to go any further. My recommendation is downloading stable versions from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ and keep trying combinations of firefox/selenium that work for your environment. For me, this is:

firefox==32.0.3 selenium==2.43.0

I'm referring to the changelog here: http://selenium.googlecode.com/git/java/CHANGELOG to see which versions are supposedly compatible.

Basically, what is happening is webdriver is polling on its port until it can establish a socket connection.

def _wait_until_connectable(self):     """Blocks until the extension is connectable in the firefox."""     count = 0     while not utils.is_connectable(self.profile.port):         if self.process.poll() is not None:             # Browser has exited             raise WebDriverException("The browser appears to have exited "                   "before we could connect. If you specified a log_file in "                   "the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.")         if count == 30:             self.kill()             raise WebDriverException("Can't load the profile. Profile "                   "Dir: %s If you specified a log_file in the "                   "FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.")         count += 1         time.sleep(1)     return True 

And then if there is an socket error, keep going. So what you are probably seeing (at least what I am) is the browser hanging for 30 secs.

def is_connectable(port):     """     Tries to connect to the server at port to see if it is running.      :Args:      - port: The port to connect.     """     try:         socket_ = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)         socket_.settimeout(1)         socket_.connect(("127.0.0.1", port))         socket_.close()         return True     except socket.error:         return False 

Bleh. Alright, well I finally just decided to store the specific version I want and switch to the compatible selenium version.

bin_dir = os.path.join(const.WEBDRIVER_DIR, 'firefox', 'binary', '32.0.3', 'linux-x86_64', 'firefox') binary = FirefoxBinary(firefox_path=bin_dir) driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary) 

I also highly recommend adding a log file to the firefox binary and checking that. Your issue might be unique and any bizarre errors will be logged there:

log_dir = os.path.join(const.LOGS_DIR, 'firefox')     try:     os.makedirs(directory) except OSError, e:     if e.errno == errno.EEXIST and os.path.isdir(directory):         pass log_path = os.path.join(log_dir, '{}.log'.format(datetime.datetime.now().isoformat('_')) log_file = open(log_path, 'w') binary = FirefoxBinary(firefox_path=bin_dir, log_file=log_file)