Selenium, Firefox 3, and Mac OS X
The latest Firefox 3 betas are really good, and a big improvement over Firefox 2. The improvement in performance on my Eee PC is enormous, but even on the quad-core Xeon I’ve got at work, the increased snappiness is welcome. There are some good interface tweaks as well; after learning to work with the ‘Awesome Bar’ rather than against it, I’ve come to like it. Unfortunately, there’s a downside: Selenium, which we use for acceptance testing at Reevoo, doesn’t work with Firefox 3.
I’m sure that this state of affairs will be addressed in the near future as Firefox 3 gets closer to release, but, in the meantime, it’s easy enough to get Selenium working without having to go back to the Dark Ages of Firefox 2 browsing:
- Install Firefox 3 in
~/Applications - Install Firefox 2 in
/Applications
Stick the newer application from your home directory in the Dock and use it for browsing; Selenium will find the older application in the system Applications directory and use that for its purposes. Everyone’s happy!
2008-04-09 14:56 UTC. Comments: 2.
Alex Newbury
Wrote at 2008-04-17 08:40 UTC using Firefox 3.0b5 on Mac OS X:
Hey Paul, good call on the new Firefox, it really is very good- however, i’ve found one other annoying perk with it. When trying to Log on to my university network (wireless), the ip address cannot be trusted (as it’s from an unknown source), and usually (in firefox 2) it give me the option to accept the certificate, but not in 3.So to log on to the internet, i’ve got to use safari to accept the certificate/log on, then Firefox to browse.
Otherwise, as i said, very nice browser.
Tony Pitale
Wrote at 2008-06-19 19:24 UTC using Firefox 3.0 on Mac OS X:
You can also change *chrome to *safari. That may not be ideal if you aim to be functional in Firefox, but it does still work if you simply need to test functionality.