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Created June 1, 2012 08:58
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Fixing "Will you help improve Mozilla Firefox" message that appears while using Selenium under Mac OSX, Part I
Am trying to troubleshoot issues with Selenium running in our Continuous Integration environment.
Firefox 11 is what I started with on my local Mac machine.
A search about the problem lead to multiple results [1]. There seemed to be promising info about config
settings as mentioned in [2]. I tried using about:config as described in [3].
I edited the settings but the next time Firefox opened, the message was stil there. It occurred to me that
maybe the profile I was editing for toolkit.telemetry (my default Firefox profile) was not the profile
being used by the instance of Firefox that was firing up for Selenium tests.
Then, I stumbled upon the Profile Manager in [4] and in particular, for Mac in [5] which, in the end,
didn't help because it (the Profile Manager) only knew about my default profile.
I fired up a Selenium test again but this time did a "ps -ax | grep firefox" and discovered the Firefox
app using a profile in:
/var/folders/ag/<SOME_HASH_VALUE>/-Tmp-/
... which disappeared after Firefox closed. I think the custom profile is created by the Selenium jar, but
as I spent enough time in this rabbit hole, I decided to downgrade the version of Firefox on my dev machine
to that which is on the CI box: 3.0.5 [6] to get on with my work.
In Part II, I'll get to a more robust fix. I suspect I'll have to update, at a minimum, the Selenium
gem (WebDrive anyone?)
Quite possibly, I'll need to update the selenium-client gem too.
REFERENCES
[1] : https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=h9&ie=UTF-8#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=webhp&q=will%20you%20help%20improve%20mozilla%20firefox%20selenium&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=cb92153a33a03e05&ix=h9&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=853&bih=388
[2] : http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/897733
[3] : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/898549
[4] : http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Profiles#w_how-do-i-find-my-profile
[5] : http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager#Mac_OS_X
[6] : https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0b5/mac/en-US/
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