Specifying custom screen resolution in Selenium tests

Question

As mentioned in the below blog, we can modify screen resolution during selenium test runs. http://blog.testingbot.com/2013/03/15/screen-resolution-option-now-available-for-all-selenium-tests

Tried the below code(as mentioned in "https://saucelabs.com/docs/additional-config"), but not setting the specified resolution. Is this still not available for Selenium?

DesiredCapabilities dc=new DesiredCapabilities();    
dc.setCapability("screen-resolution","1280x1024");

Answer 1

Sauce Labs != Selenium

Sauce labs use that capability to provision you a VM with the desired resolution, it's not a capability that Selenium itself knows about.

Selenium is not capable of modifying your desktop resolution!

If you want to modify your browser size in Selenium so that it matches a specific resolution you can do a:

driver.manage().window().setSize(new Dimension(1024, 768))

The above is not supported with Opera driver, so instead you would need to do:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.opera()
capabilities.setCapability("opera.arguments", "-screenwidth 1024 -screenheight 768")

While setting the browser size is not the same as setting the screen resolution, it should for all intents and purposes meet your requirements.

Answer 2

Selenium is a browser automation framework, its job is to drive a browser, not to automate your system. I don't think that a functionality such as setting a screen resolution will ever be implemented in Selenium. Setting resolution has simply nothing to do with browser automation.

I am not sure why do you want to change the resolution... How about just changing the size of your browser window? That's something you could do if you are testing responsive-designed pages.

driver.manage().window().setSize(new Dimension(800, 600));