10 ms·

Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE

294 points by slgt 9y ago

t0mbstone 9y ago
Wow, that's really sad to hear! I wonder if, instead of abandoning the project, they could put together a patron sponsorship to fund further development? I'm sure there are plenty of companies out there that rely on firefox and selenium and would be more than happy to help contribute?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > since the start of the year, there are only 11 people who have made more than 10 commits, with two people accounting for more than half of those. Since 2016, only one person has been maintaining the IDE. Apparently they are not.
- toyg 9y ago
  > rely on firefox and selenium ... but not the IDE, which is what is being abandoned. Most people don't use the IDE, or use it for a bit before they learn how to do things manually (coders like to code).
hardwaresofton 9y ago
I wonder if there's anyone here from SauceLabs or or any other company that does browser automation as a service -- was this easy to see coming? Is everything pants-on-fire there at the moment?
- neerajdotname2 9y ago
  We at http://www.trinityradar.com/ http://www.trinityradar.com/ provide browser automation service. We stopped working with Firefox a few months ago since less and less people are using firefox now. We run chrome browser on cloud. Full disclosure: I work for Trinity Radar.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    Chrome is the new IE
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      In case anyone wonders, here are some points to get you started: [X] created by a company that can't be trusted [X] made mandatory by lazy devs && corporate bean counters who refuse to let other developers do the professional thing and make stuff work cross platform [X] worse than the alternatives in many ways except being feature-by-feature and bug-by-bug compatible with the market leaders (yep: memory use, battery use, extensions)
  - chinathrow 9y ago
    Your site says "Run tests in Chrome, Firefox, or in IE 11" - so is that claim still true or am I missing something?
    - neerajdotname2 9y ago
      We need to update homepage along with all screenshots since all screenshots with Firefox are outdated now.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    But that has nothing to do with the IDE no longer being available, but merely as a cost-saver for you guys (I presume).
- simonstewart 9y ago
  We knew this was coming down the track, but the selenium project lacked the people to prevent it from happening. Sauce Labs donated Selenium Builder (nee Sauce Builder) to the project to try and help. Applitools have recently leant some engineering muscle to the problem. The problem breaks down into two main areas: * Technical: the underpinnings have switched from the XPI model to Web Components. Mozilla are doing what they think is best for their browser, and I know that they make their choices with thought and data. * People: every successful OSS project has a company or person acting as its champion. The selenium project has people working flat out for the language bindings, the w3c "WebDriver" spec, grid, and supporting the community. We lack a champion with the time to spend on IDE. We can fix the technical side of things. The thing that we could really do help with is the people-side....
  - hardwaresofton 9y ago
    Thanks for the response! Always curious how moves like this help people who are actually doing stuff in the browser automation/testing scene (I am just a trend follower/leech off the work being done), glad to hear you guys were ready and props on thinking ahead.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  Note that SauceLabs, Browserstack etc. will continue to work. This was just an extension that allowed you to create tests by click through your website rather than writing them by hand. Resulted in far brittler tests, but useful to some apparently.
Osmose 9y ago
I'd be curious to see what the usage stats on the IDE are; my company (Mozilla, ironically) uses Selenium a ton, but as far as I know we write all of our tests by hand instead of with the IDE since it allows you to use patterns like Page objects to make your tests more maintainable in the long run. Although the last time I used the IDE was years ago, so it may be more flexible than it used to be. Does anyone extensively use the IDE?
- 29052017 9y ago
  Fuck yeah
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Back when I was using it (about 4 years ago), we used it mostly as a debugging aid to understand what actually should go into some expressions. Also some people from QA, without coding skills, would use it.
- unexistance 9y ago
  previous company used it quite extensively, especially if there's a new feature the enterprise software that needs testing by the QA team we did write the test by hand tho, very DSL-like & really targeted at non-programmer
- neves 9y ago
  This is the great feature of the Ide. Kick start your tests, then you "upgrade" to hand coding. Great for learning about a new system, or to get help from less technical people when the house is on fire.
- masklinn 9y ago
  IDE is a good way to kickstart the tests, it allows non-technical people to create skeletons for tests which can then be touched up/prettified/refactored by devs.
  - slgt 9y ago
    This describes exactly my/our experience. Test recording can be a great time saver when used properly. Sure, a Java or Python guru can write a webdriver test in "seconds", but she usually does not want too. Plus the "seconds" often turn into hours of coding and debugging ;-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
snowl 9y ago
Of course, Selenium (WebDriver) still works. However, this might be the push for people to investigate other test frameworks. I found TestCafe by DevExpress (https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/ https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/) is a great tool and is also completely open source (MIT!). It's a shame that the community is so small because it's so powerful. Maybe this might be the push that moves some more people over?
- dsun180 9y ago
  I found out about Testcafe a few weeks ago. It's such a great product but too less people even know about it.
- 29052017 9y ago
  Asshole motherfucker madarchod .... Hahaha ... Lol
- arvinsim 9y ago
  > Maybe this might be the push that moves some more people over? You posted this on HN. Be careful for what you wish for ;)
- nevir 9y ago
  Their sites aren't very clear - what differentiates their open source version (http://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/ http://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/) from the paid ($500/dev/year) version? (https://testcafe.devexpress.com/ https://testcafe.devexpress.com/)
  - amoskovkin 9y ago
    You can read about the difference between free and paid versions here: https://testcafe-discuss.devexpress.com/t/what-is-the-difference-between-the-open-source-version-and-the-paid-version-of-the-testcafe/253 https://testcafe-discuss.devexpress.com/t/what-is-the-differ...
  - ajb 9y ago
    There is a reply here apparently from a developer of testcafe, but it's 'dead'. It's a perfectly reasonable comment, so hopefully the mods can resurrect it - and check if the account is banned for no reason (that's the only comment it made, so I don't see why).
fulafel 9y ago
What are some good open source tools in the area of rapid development ofweb end-to-end tests? I know about Robot Framework, which does not record and replay but instead uses an AppleScript type english-flavoured DSL. But still seems quicker than scripting Selenium.
- flukus 9y ago
  I like SpecFlow (http://specflow.org/ http://specflow.org/), a .net flavor of cucumber. It's not quite rapid development, but as with others here I've found the test recorders to be too brittle to justify the upfront time savings anyway. I've used it for front end testing and database/view testing.
jph 9y ago
Selenium IDE is a tremendous help for projects that want integration testing, and want to enable any team member to write ballpark tests. Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours. For example, my team took an existing web app with no tests, and had the project manager and junior business analysis go through the entire app with the Selenium IDE, writing tests. This enabled our dev team to start coding fast, and refactoring fast. In parallel our QA team then took those tests and used them as first-drafts to create even better tests that were generic, maintainable, randomizable, and so forth.
- y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
  Just to get an other datapoint: we used to build tests for selenium with selenium ide too, but quickly found out that the used selectors for the elements often had to be manually tweaked, and so we switched to http://nightwatchjs.org/ http://nightwatchjs.org/ for our tests, and write them by hand. Tests are more reliable now, and devs are happy with it. Based on my (limited) experience, selenium ide is not something that is absolutely needed. It's a fine piece of software, but devs can do fine without.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Are these E2E tests robust? I found they often break easily
    - my2ndaccount 9y ago
      Are these E2E tests robust? I found they often break easily
    - y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
      Yes they work. The only thing you have to watch out for is the timing for the assertions with .waitForElementVisible('[name="main"]', 10000) otherwise you sometimes check for a value in a field, but the field is not there yet, and the test fails. That's the only gotcha we found we have to be careful about.
- 9y ago
sweep3r 9y ago
This is what is going to happen to most extensions. Mozilla is bonkers, doing this. They're going to regret it.
- 29052017 9y ago
  Bhag bhosdike
- mixedCase 9y ago
  Are they? The old system is holding improvements back. If they move to a superset of Chrome's they can still get Chrome add-ons and then some. If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Regardless Firefox will finally get faster, more responsive, more secure, AND still have a better extension API than Blink/WebKit.
  - sweep3r 9y ago
    >If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Using a fork is also bonkers. I don't trust the security of my web browsing on a fork. Most people won't, either. So Firefox will just get this nice metric saying "most people have not moved to a fork" and will be able to pat themselves in the back. But it's bogus.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Forks (or old versions of Firefox + extensions) can be run in isolated VMs on platforms like Qubes.
      - 4c2383f5c88e911 9y ago
        That's kind of a moot point when your browser handles most of your online interactions (and therefore a good chunk of your online identity, which is quite valuable to most people). Even if you isolate it as much as you can, which is a good thing to do in any case, it can still do a lot of damage without escaping the sandbox.
29052017 9y ago
Bhenchod yeh hai kya
danidiaz 9y ago
Test recorders are an antipattern. They lure you with their "no programming required!" siren call, but the generated scripts invaribly end up as a fragile, poorly abstracted mess. GUI tests suites, especially those created with recorders, are prone to become unmaintainable beasts full of flaky tests. This old interview with Bret Pettichord makes good points about the use of recorders: https://youtu.be/s_CUPs6xAWw?t=590 https://youtu.be/s_CUPs6xAWw?t=590
- neves 9y ago
  All you said is true, but this doesn't stop Selenium IDE of being a valuable tool. You just need to know when to use it. Without it a lot systems in my company would have zero tests. Not even bad and fragile ones.
  - bshacklett 9y ago
    One could argue that bad or fragile tests can be more harmful than having no tests at all.
    - danidiaz 9y ago
      Exactly, there is a degreee of flakiness beyond which you don't gain much assurance from your tests and you spend more time fighting fires in the testsuite than actually testing your app.
  - mariusmg 9y ago
    >You just need to know when to use it When exactly is that ? Never ? That clusterfuck of generated code is useless.
- camus2 9y ago
  > Test recorders are an antipattern. Selenium IDE is a useful tool for QA and a lot of user use case. Can people stop calling anything they don't like "antipattern"? All tools are useful when used correctly. Anything can be "an anti pattern" when used incorrectly.
- 9y ago
jackblack8989 9y ago
I have a feeling that the kind of firms that were benefiting from Selenium IDE (hiring cheap labor to write tests as an afterthought) were not the kind of firms that would spend money to contribute. This isn't sustainable.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  Or the kind of engineers capable of contributing to the software.
brian_herman 9y ago
Is there like a electron for firefox xul? There is actually is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XULRunner https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL... edit: answering my own question.
- Kliment 9y ago
  There used to be, but it got killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
fdim 9y ago
For this exact reason I made an extension for chrome that covers some of it's features: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/e2e-test-builder/pamfkepooglpdkepmlopejpmcpggaobo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/e2e-test-builder/p... I'd rather tag elements of interest and record (and adjust manually) than write everything in code.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Looks interesting.
my2ndaccount 9y ago
Selenium is fantastic for projects that need integration testing and enables to write ballpark tests. Selenium IDE optimized our process that helped us save a lot of time.
8114Y 9y ago
I am very sad to hear this. Yes, this is antipattern, yes, selectors are doomed, but I had so many good experiences of introducing automated integration tests with IDE to QA teams, who later moved to hand-written tests. Learning curve was small and benefits were quick.
rdiddly 9y ago
Maybe instead of "will not be fixed" the headline should say "contributors needed?"
- simonstewart 9y ago
  YES!
- nallerooth 9y ago
  Can't upvote this enough!
bertolo1988 9y ago
Why would they maintain it? Browsers are providing headless ways to accomplish the same.
- foota 9y ago
  The selenium IDE is a tool that records actions done in the browser for replay, not the test driving component.
mememaestro 9y ago
abandon all hope ye who is a web dev
blubb-fish 9y ago
We (ab)use Selenium on headless Linux servers for task automation where no API is available. I hope this isn't affected - otherwise I'll have to `sudo apt-mark hold firefox`. Suggestions for alternative software for this purpose?
- rmetzler 9y ago
  Chrome has a relatively new headless mode and there are Puppeteer and probably some more language bindings for it. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...
- simonstewart 9y ago
  Selenium will continue working, and is actively supported by Mozilla. The IDE (the plugin that allowed UI-based recording of tests) is the only thing that's not working.
  - blubb-fish 9y ago
    sure - but this might very well indicate a trend.
    - blubb-fish 9y ago
      who on earth is downvoting my comments and why? when the developers involved with Selenium suddenly decide to just drop a browser for one of their sub-projects then this might very well indicate a trend - even if it's just that firefox is less actively supported in future.
      - MikusR 9y ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
        blubb-fish 9y ago
        pretty generic, I'd say ...
jgraham 9y ago
There seems to be a certain amount of confusion on this thread, so just to be sure that it's clear, Selenium itself will continue to work with future releases of Firefox. This means that existing WebDriver-based browser automation remains compatible with with Firefox 55+. SauceLabs', and other testing-infrastructure-as-a-service providers' support for Firefox will be unchanged. The only thing that will stop working is the Selenium IDE which is a XUL extension that allows writing selenium tests without writing any code. This is undoubtedly useful to some people, but as the original post says, there are alternatives in development that are targetting a similar niche, so the situation is not as dire as the title implies (I imagine the title is worded this way to reduce the number of duplicate bug reports that the Selenium owners have to wade through on the subject of Firefox 55+ compat. for IDE). To expand further on Mozilla's ongoing commitment to WebDriver, we employ one of the editors of the WebDriver specification [1], are making significant contributions to the WebDriver testsuite, and are actively working on our geckodriver implementation to ensure that we have a fully-featured standards-complaint implementation as soon as possible. I also know that other vendors are working on improving the spec compatibility of their implementations, so I think the future of WebDriver is very promising, with fewer differences between drivers that aren't the result of fundamental differences in the browsers under test. [1] https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html
- romaniv 9y ago
  > there are alternatives in development that are targetting a similar niche Which tools are out there (open source and as easy to use as Selenium IDE)?
  - Geoff2 9y ago
    Here are some IDE alternatives for record and replay: - iMacros (Firefox + Chrome, not open-source) - Kantu IDE Light (Chrome, open-source) - E2E Test Builder (Chrome, open-source) None is 1:1 replacement (yet?), each has a different focus. there is also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13586904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13586904
  - 9y ago
Aardwolf 9y ago
Might it still work in SeaMonkey? Unless SeaMonkey also plans to change the extension mechanism...
sambe 9y ago
I'm getting the impression that a lot of extension developers are not just complaining about these changes but also making the decision to shut down their development. Feels like it could be pretty bad news for Firefox.
- nallerooth 9y ago
  I believe that this was communicated by the Firefox team more than a year ago, so it shouldn't be news to anyone who have been maintaining their extension(s). For all those people who developed something and then moved on to something else, it may seem like that year passed really quickly - and the only option left is to drop the extension.
  - sambe 9y ago
    I didn't mean to imply people are surprised. They have made the decision regardless of the amount of notice.
slgt 9y ago
In the last hours since submitting this link to HN, I started using the Selenium IDE made by Kantu: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-automation/gcbalfbdmfieckjlnblleoemohcganoc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto... It works well for what it does and covers basic recording/replay for the core commands. But it is a new project, and by no means a full replacement yet. Code on Github (GPL license).
- tw21 9y ago
  This extension uses the Webapi... so I assume it can be "backported" to Firefox?
norswap 9y ago
The decision for Firefox to move to web extensions is stupid. The only reason I'm still using Firefox, which is technologically inferior (1) to webkit-based browsers are its high quality addons. (1) Slower & crashes more, just more UX problems on websites all around (including youtube!). And this Selenium thing is just another example of that. You're really crippled in what you can do in Chrome. As a compulsive hoarder of bookmarks (about 2k last time I checked), it's important for me to have a bookmarks sidebar. Chrome doesn't have one, and it's not possible to add one via an addon.

294 points by slgt 9y ago

Wow, that's really sad to hear! I wonder if, instead of abandoning the project, they could put together a patron sponsorship to fund further development? I'm sure there are plenty of companies out there that rely on firefox and selenium and would be more than happy to help contribute?

pjmlp 9y ago
> since the start of the year, there are only 11 people who have made more than 10 commits, with two people accounting for more than half of those. Since 2016, only one person has been maintaining the IDE. Apparently they are not.
toyg 9y ago
> rely on firefox and selenium ... but not the IDE, which is what is being abandoned. Most people don't use the IDE, or use it for a bit before they learn how to do things manually (coders like to code).

hardwaresofton 9y ago

I wonder if there's anyone here from SauceLabs or or any other company that does browser automation as a service -- was this easy to see coming? Is everything pants-on-fire there at the moment?

neerajdotname2 9y ago
We at http://www.trinityradar.com/ http://www.trinityradar.com/ provide browser automation service. We stopped working with Firefox a few months ago since less and less people are using firefox now. We run chrome browser on cloud. Full disclosure: I work for Trinity Radar.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  Chrome is the new IE
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    In case anyone wonders, here are some points to get you started: [X] created by a company that can't be trusted [X] made mandatory by lazy devs && corporate bean counters who refuse to let other developers do the professional thing and make stuff work cross platform [X] worse than the alternatives in many ways except being feature-by-feature and bug-by-bug compatible with the market leaders (yep: memory use, battery use, extensions)
- chinathrow 9y ago
  Your site says "Run tests in Chrome, Firefox, or in IE 11" - so is that claim still true or am I missing something?
  - neerajdotname2 9y ago
    We need to update homepage along with all screenshots since all screenshots with Firefox are outdated now.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  But that has nothing to do with the IDE no longer being available, but merely as a cost-saver for you guys (I presume).
simonstewart 9y ago
We knew this was coming down the track, but the selenium project lacked the people to prevent it from happening. Sauce Labs donated Selenium Builder (nee Sauce Builder) to the project to try and help. Applitools have recently leant some engineering muscle to the problem. The problem breaks down into two main areas: * Technical: the underpinnings have switched from the XPI model to Web Components. Mozilla are doing what they think is best for their browser, and I know that they make their choices with thought and data. * People: every successful OSS project has a company or person acting as its champion. The selenium project has people working flat out for the language bindings, the w3c "WebDriver" spec, grid, and supporting the community. We lack a champion with the time to spend on IDE. We can fix the technical side of things. The thing that we could really do help with is the people-side....
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  Thanks for the response! Always curious how moves like this help people who are actually doing stuff in the browser automation/testing scene (I am just a trend follower/leech off the work being done), glad to hear you guys were ready and props on thinking ahead.
Vinnl 9y ago
Note that SauceLabs, Browserstack etc. will continue to work. This was just an extension that allowed you to create tests by click through your website rather than writing them by hand. Resulted in far brittler tests, but useful to some apparently.

Osmose 9y ago

I'd be curious to see what the usage stats on the IDE are; my company (Mozilla, ironically) uses Selenium a ton, but as far as I know we write all of our tests by hand instead of with the IDE since it allows you to use patterns like Page objects to make your tests more maintainable in the long run. Although the last time I used the IDE was years ago, so it may be more flexible than it used to be. Does anyone extensively use the IDE?

29052017 9y ago
Fuck yeah
pjmlp 9y ago
Back when I was using it (about 4 years ago), we used it mostly as a debugging aid to understand what actually should go into some expressions. Also some people from QA, without coding skills, would use it.
unexistance 9y ago
previous company used it quite extensively, especially if there's a new feature the enterprise software that needs testing by the QA team we did write the test by hand tho, very DSL-like & really targeted at non-programmer
neves 9y ago
This is the great feature of the Ide. Kick start your tests, then you "upgrade" to hand coding. Great for learning about a new system, or to get help from less technical people when the house is on fire.
masklinn 9y ago
IDE is a good way to kickstart the tests, it allows non-technical people to create skeletons for tests which can then be touched up/prettified/refactored by devs.
- slgt 9y ago
  This describes exactly my/our experience. Test recording can be a great time saver when used properly. Sure, a Java or Python guru can write a webdriver test in "seconds", but she usually does not want too. Plus the "seconds" often turn into hours of coding and debugging ;-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

snowl 9y ago

Of course, Selenium (WebDriver) still works. However, this might be the push for people to investigate other test frameworks. I found TestCafe by DevExpress (https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/ https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/) is a great tool and is also completely open source (MIT!). It's a shame that the community is so small because it's so powerful. Maybe this might be the push that moves some more people over?

dsun180 9y ago
I found out about Testcafe a few weeks ago. It's such a great product but too less people even know about it.
29052017 9y ago
Asshole motherfucker madarchod .... Hahaha ... Lol
arvinsim 9y ago
> Maybe this might be the push that moves some more people over? You posted this on HN. Be careful for what you wish for ;)
nevir 9y ago
Their sites aren't very clear - what differentiates their open source version (http://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/ http://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/) from the paid ($500/dev/year) version? (https://testcafe.devexpress.com/ https://testcafe.devexpress.com/)
- amoskovkin 9y ago
  You can read about the difference between free and paid versions here: https://testcafe-discuss.devexpress.com/t/what-is-the-difference-between-the-open-source-version-and-the-paid-version-of-the-testcafe/253 https://testcafe-discuss.devexpress.com/t/what-is-the-differ...
- ajb 9y ago
  There is a reply here apparently from a developer of testcafe, but it's 'dead'. It's a perfectly reasonable comment, so hopefully the mods can resurrect it - and check if the account is banned for no reason (that's the only comment it made, so I don't see why).

fulafel 9y ago

What are some good open source tools in the area of rapid development ofweb end-to-end tests? I know about Robot Framework, which does not record and replay but instead uses an AppleScript type english-flavoured DSL. But still seems quicker than scripting Selenium.

flukus 9y ago
I like SpecFlow (http://specflow.org/ http://specflow.org/), a .net flavor of cucumber. It's not quite rapid development, but as with others here I've found the test recorders to be too brittle to justify the upfront time savings anyway. I've used it for front end testing and database/view testing.

jph 9y ago

Selenium IDE is a tremendous help for projects that want integration testing, and want to enable any team member to write ballpark tests. Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours. For example, my team took an existing web app with no tests, and had the project manager and junior business analysis go through the entire app with the Selenium IDE, writing tests. This enabled our dev team to start coding fast, and refactoring fast. In parallel our QA team then took those tests and used them as first-drafts to create even better tests that were generic, maintainable, randomizable, and so forth.

y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
Just to get an other datapoint: we used to build tests for selenium with selenium ide too, but quickly found out that the used selectors for the elements often had to be manually tweaked, and so we switched to http://nightwatchjs.org/ http://nightwatchjs.org/ for our tests, and write them by hand. Tests are more reliable now, and devs are happy with it. Based on my (limited) experience, selenium ide is not something that is absolutely needed. It's a fine piece of software, but devs can do fine without.
- k__ 9y ago
  Are these E2E tests robust? I found they often break easily
  - my2ndaccount 9y ago
    Are these E2E tests robust? I found they often break easily
  - y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
    Yes they work. The only thing you have to watch out for is the timing for the assertions with .waitForElementVisible('[name="main"]', 10000) otherwise you sometimes check for a value in a field, but the field is not there yet, and the test fails. That's the only gotcha we found we have to be careful about.
9y ago

sweep3r 9y ago

This is what is going to happen to most extensions. Mozilla is bonkers, doing this. They're going to regret it.

29052017 9y ago
Bhag bhosdike
mixedCase 9y ago
Are they? The old system is holding improvements back. If they move to a superset of Chrome's they can still get Chrome add-ons and then some. If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Regardless Firefox will finally get faster, more responsive, more secure, AND still have a better extension API than Blink/WebKit.
- sweep3r 9y ago
  >If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Using a fork is also bonkers. I don't trust the security of my web browsing on a fork. Most people won't, either. So Firefox will just get this nice metric saying "most people have not moved to a fork" and will be able to pat themselves in the back. But it's bogus.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Forks (or old versions of Firefox + extensions) can be run in isolated VMs on platforms like Qubes.
    - 4c2383f5c88e911 9y ago
      That's kind of a moot point when your browser handles most of your online interactions (and therefore a good chunk of your online identity, which is quite valuable to most people). Even if you isolate it as much as you can, which is a good thing to do in any case, it can still do a lot of damage without escaping the sandbox.

29052017 9y ago

Bhenchod yeh hai kya

danidiaz 9y ago

Test recorders are an antipattern. They lure you with their "no programming required!" siren call, but the generated scripts invaribly end up as a fragile, poorly abstracted mess. GUI tests suites, especially those created with recorders, are prone to become unmaintainable beasts full of flaky tests. This old interview with Bret Pettichord makes good points about the use of recorders: https://youtu.be/s_CUPs6xAWw?t=590 https://youtu.be/s_CUPs6xAWw?t=590

neves 9y ago
All you said is true, but this doesn't stop Selenium IDE of being a valuable tool. You just need to know when to use it. Without it a lot systems in my company would have zero tests. Not even bad and fragile ones.
- bshacklett 9y ago
  One could argue that bad or fragile tests can be more harmful than having no tests at all.
  - danidiaz 9y ago
    Exactly, there is a degreee of flakiness beyond which you don't gain much assurance from your tests and you spend more time fighting fires in the testsuite than actually testing your app.
- mariusmg 9y ago
  >You just need to know when to use it When exactly is that ? Never ? That clusterfuck of generated code is useless.
camus2 9y ago
> Test recorders are an antipattern. Selenium IDE is a useful tool for QA and a lot of user use case. Can people stop calling anything they don't like "antipattern"? All tools are useful when used correctly. Anything can be "an anti pattern" when used incorrectly.
9y ago

jackblack8989 9y ago

I have a feeling that the kind of firms that were benefiting from Selenium IDE (hiring cheap labor to write tests as an afterthought) were not the kind of firms that would spend money to contribute. This isn't sustainable.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Or the kind of engineers capable of contributing to the software.

brian_herman 9y ago

Is there like a electron for firefox xul? There is actually is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XULRunner https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL... edit: answering my own question.

Kliment 9y ago
There used to be, but it got killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

fdim 9y ago

For this exact reason I made an extension for chrome that covers some of it's features: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/e2e-test-builder/pamfkepooglpdkepmlopejpmcpggaobo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/e2e-test-builder/p... I'd rather tag elements of interest and record (and adjust manually) than write everything in code.

noir_lord 9y ago
Looks interesting.

my2ndaccount 9y ago

Selenium is fantastic for projects that need integration testing and enables to write ballpark tests. Selenium IDE optimized our process that helped us save a lot of time.

8114Y 9y ago

I am very sad to hear this. Yes, this is antipattern, yes, selectors are doomed, but I had so many good experiences of introducing automated integration tests with IDE to QA teams, who later moved to hand-written tests. Learning curve was small and benefits were quick.

rdiddly 9y ago

Maybe instead of "will not be fixed" the headline should say "contributors needed?"

simonstewart 9y ago
YES!
nallerooth 9y ago
Can't upvote this enough!

bertolo1988 9y ago

Why would they maintain it? Browsers are providing headless ways to accomplish the same.

foota 9y ago
The selenium IDE is a tool that records actions done in the browser for replay, not the test driving component.

mememaestro 9y ago

abandon all hope ye who is a web dev

blubb-fish 9y ago

We (ab)use Selenium on headless Linux servers for task automation where no API is available. I hope this isn't affected - otherwise I'll have to `sudo apt-mark hold firefox`. Suggestions for alternative software for this purpose?

rmetzler 9y ago
Chrome has a relatively new headless mode and there are Puppeteer and probably some more language bindings for it. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...
simonstewart 9y ago
Selenium will continue working, and is actively supported by Mozilla. The IDE (the plugin that allowed UI-based recording of tests) is the only thing that's not working.
- blubb-fish 9y ago
  sure - but this might very well indicate a trend.
  - blubb-fish 9y ago
    who on earth is downvoting my comments and why? when the developers involved with Selenium suddenly decide to just drop a browser for one of their sub-projects then this might very well indicate a trend - even if it's just that firefox is less actively supported in future.
    - MikusR 9y ago
      https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
      - blubb-fish 9y ago
        pretty generic, I'd say ...

jgraham 9y ago

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion on this thread, so just to be sure that it's clear, Selenium itself will continue to work with future releases of Firefox. This means that existing WebDriver-based browser automation remains compatible with with Firefox 55+. SauceLabs', and other testing-infrastructure-as-a-service providers' support for Firefox will be unchanged. The only thing that will stop working is the Selenium IDE which is a XUL extension that allows writing selenium tests without writing any code. This is undoubtedly useful to some people, but as the original post says, there are alternatives in development that are targetting a similar niche, so the situation is not as dire as the title implies (I imagine the title is worded this way to reduce the number of duplicate bug reports that the Selenium owners have to wade through on the subject of Firefox 55+ compat. for IDE). To expand further on Mozilla's ongoing commitment to WebDriver, we employ one of the editors of the WebDriver specification [1], are making significant contributions to the WebDriver testsuite, and are actively working on our geckodriver implementation to ensure that we have a fully-featured standards-complaint implementation as soon as possible. I also know that other vendors are working on improving the spec compatibility of their implementations, so I think the future of WebDriver is very promising, with fewer differences between drivers that aren't the result of fundamental differences in the browsers under test. [1] https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html

romaniv 9y ago
> there are alternatives in development that are targetting a similar niche Which tools are out there (open source and as easy to use as Selenium IDE)?
- Geoff2 9y ago
  Here are some IDE alternatives for record and replay: - iMacros (Firefox + Chrome, not open-source) - Kantu IDE Light (Chrome, open-source) - E2E Test Builder (Chrome, open-source) None is 1:1 replacement (yet?), each has a different focus. there is also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13586904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13586904
- 9y ago

Aardwolf 9y ago

Might it still work in SeaMonkey? Unless SeaMonkey also plans to change the extension mechanism...

sambe 9y ago

I'm getting the impression that a lot of extension developers are not just complaining about these changes but also making the decision to shut down their development. Feels like it could be pretty bad news for Firefox.

nallerooth 9y ago
I believe that this was communicated by the Firefox team more than a year ago, so it shouldn't be news to anyone who have been maintaining their extension(s). For all those people who developed something and then moved on to something else, it may seem like that year passed really quickly - and the only option left is to drop the extension.
- sambe 9y ago
  I didn't mean to imply people are surprised. They have made the decision regardless of the amount of notice.

slgt 9y ago

In the last hours since submitting this link to HN, I started using the Selenium IDE made by Kantu: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-automation/gcbalfbdmfieckjlnblleoemohcganoc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto... It works well for what it does and covers basic recording/replay for the core commands. But it is a new project, and by no means a full replacement yet. Code on Github (GPL license).

tw21 9y ago
This extension uses the Webapi... so I assume it can be "backported" to Firefox?

norswap 9y ago

The decision for Firefox to move to web extensions is stupid. The only reason I'm still using Firefox, which is technologically inferior (1) to webkit-based browsers are its high quality addons. (1) Slower & crashes more, just more UX problems on websites all around (including youtube!). And this Selenium thing is just another example of that. You're really crippled in what you can do in Chrome. As a compulsive hoarder of bookmarks (about 2k last time I checked), it's important for me to have a bookmarks sidebar. Chrome doesn't have one, and it's not possible to add one via an addon.