How to reuse the same WebDriver in different application using selenium

Question

i'm writing here to ask if is possible to init WebDriver

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

and use the same browser for many jar application, so doing, in other jar file, something like:

int port = ...;
String host = ...;
WebDriver driver = getDriver(host,port);

i ask this question because FirefoxDriver is very slow to load and happear, and i need to call many jar that load that driver. i think that in this way, loading just one time my driver, my total application will be fastly than open N-times N-instances of that driver. i hope that my question is clear and well-formed :) thanks to all!

EDIT: i see that there is the possibility to use RemoteWebDriver.

DesiredCapabilities capability = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub"), capability);

How can i use it? when i have to instantiate the webdriver in localhost:4444?

Answer 1

This is the most demanded feature request in Selenium. However, it's still not possible to attach a WebDriver to running browser window. What you discovered in RemoteWebDriver is the posibility to run tests remotely on another computer. But that computer still has to start a new browser window.

You could, I guess, write your application as something as a HUB that would enqueue all jars (classes) to run, would start a single instance of Firefox and pass the driver reference around. It's not a nice solution and as far as I know, nobody has done it yet.

BUT! The majority of time spent on startup in Firefox is creating a new FirefoxProfile. If you created one profile dedicated to testing and started your Firefox always with this profile, it would be significantly faster.