How to access Firefox Extension I added in Selenium Webdriver?

Question

I know that you can load up either an existing Firefox profile, or create one using Ruby Bindings in the selenium-webdriver gem, as described here:

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/RubyBindings

And then use add_extension to add any number of Firefox extensions to the instance, but then what? The window for the extension I'm using does not appear during the test. How do I use the extension?

Is there a way to have the extension be open by default when the driver opens Firefox?

Here is the code I'm using:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "selenium-webdriver"

default_profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.from_name "default"
default_profile.add_extension("/Users/******/Library/Application Support/Firef\
ox/Profiles/wvon3h99.default/extensions/{9c51bd27-6ed8-4000-a2bf-36cb95c0c947}.\
xpi")

driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:firefox, :profile => default_profile)
driver.navigate.to "http://google.com"

element = driver.find_element(:name, 'q')
element.send_keys "Hello WebDriver!"
element.submit

puts driver.title

driver.quit

Answer 1

It depends on extension. Usually the extension's behaviour can be to some extent controlled by setting appropriate properties (the ones you can find in about:config) when creating an FF profile. For instance to have Firebug window open by default after FF starts I would include the following line in my code:

default_profile["extensions.firebug.allPagesActivation"] = true

The extensions I use usually have some kind of auto-export feature that automatically sends data to server or saves it on disk. I am afraid there is no way of controlling an extension with WebDriver so not all extensions will be usable in automated tests.