Implementing Firefox profile in Selenium Webdriver with Java

While automating a web application, we want the application to be opened in a customized browser. A browser without any theme/extension/addons or with customized settings; settings like pop-ups are allowed, certain sites are certified etc. The reason why we want a different browser profile is our regular use browser has several addons installed, several bookmarks, and some browser level restrictions which might hamper the proper functioning of the AUT.

Firefox provides a good mechanism to manage different profiles of browser in the same machine. http://goo.gl/NTklV is a link which shows how to create a profile in Firefox. While creating a profile, we can customized the browser settings per our project need.

 This tip is about how to implement a profile in Selenium Web driver using Java. This implementation is of course after manually creation of the profile. The below code snippet demonstrates the implementation of profile in Web driver:

 ProfilesIni allProfiles = new ProfilesIni(); //Declare an object of ProfilesIni class

 FirefoxProfile fProfile = allProfiles.getProfile(“Profile Name”); //Get the specific Firefox profile information. “Profile Name” here is the name given to the profile while creating it.

 FirefoxDriver wbdv = new FirefoxDriver(fProfile); //Pass the profile information to FirefoxDriver.

 When a browser will be opened using “wbdv” object, it’ll be opened with the specified profile.

Written By: Priyanka Agrawal, QA Engineer, Mindfire Solutions