Selenium 2.53 not working on Firefox 47

Solution 1:

Unfortunately Selenium WebDriver 2.53.0 is not compatible with Firefox 47.0. The WebDriver component which handles Firefox browsers (FirefoxDriver) will be discontinued. As of version 3.0, Selenium WebDriver will need the geckodriver binary to manage Firefox browsers. More info here and here.

Therefore, in order to use Firefox 47.0 as browser with Selenium WebDriver 2.53.0, you need to download the Firefox driver (which is a binary file called geckodriver as of version 0.8.0, and formerly wires) and export its absolute path to the variable webdriver.gecko.driver as a system property in your Java code:

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/path/to/geckodriver");

Luckily, the library WebDriverManager can do this work for you, i.e. download the proper Marionette binary for your machine (Linux, Mac, or Windows) and export the value of the proper system property. To use this library, you need to include this dependency into your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>5.0.1</version>
</dependency>

... and then execute this line in your program before using WebDriver:

WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();

A complete running example of a JUnit 4 test case using WebDriver could be as follows:

public class FirefoxTest {

    protected WebDriver driver;

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setupClass() {
        WebDriverManager.firefoxdriver().setup();
    }

    @Before
    public void setupTest() {
        driver = new FirefoxDriver();
    }

    @After
    public void teardown() {
        if (driver != null) {
            driver.quit();
        }
    }

    @Test
    public void test() {
        // Your test code here
    }
}

Take into account that Marionette will be the only option for future (for WebDriver 3+ and Firefox 48+), but currently (version 0.9.0 at writing time) is not very stable. Take a look to the Marionette roadmap for further details.

UPDATE

Selenium WebDriver 2.53.1 has been released on 30th June 2016. FirefoxDriver is working again with Firefox 47.0.1 as browser.

Solution 2:

Try using firefox 46.0.1. It best matches with Selenium 2.53

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/46.0.1/win64/en-US/

Solution 3:

I had the same issue and found out that you need to switch drivers because support was dropped. Instead of using the Firefox Driver, you need to use the Marionette Driver in order to run your tests. I am currently working through the setup myself and can post some suggested steps if you'd like when I have a working example.

Here are the steps I followed to get this working on my Java environment on Mac (worked for me in my Linux installations (Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu) as well):

1. Download the nightly executable from the releases page
2. Unpack the archive
3. Create a directory for Marionette (i.e., mkdir -p /opt/marionette)
4. Move the unpacked executable file to the directory you made
5. Update your $PATH to include the executable (also, edit your .bash_profile if you want)
6. :bangbang: Make sure you chmod +x /opt/marionette/wires-x.x.x so that it is executable
7. In your launch, make sure you use the following code below (it is what I used on Mac)

Quick Note

Still not working as expected, but at least gets the browser launched now. Need to figure out why - right now it looks like I need to rewrite my tests to get it to work.

Java Snippet

WebDriver browser = new MarionetteDriver();
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/opt/marionette/wires-0.7.1-OSX");

Solution 4:

If you're on OSX using Homebrew, you can install old Firefox versions via brew cask:

brew tap goldcaddy77/firefox
brew cask install firefox-46 # or whatever version you want

After installing, you'll just need to rename your FF executable in the Applications directory to "Firefox".

More info can be found at the git repo homebrew-firefox. Props to smclernon for creating the original cask.

Solution 5:

If you're on a Mac do brew install geckodriver and off you go!