Supporting Additional Browsers and Browser Configurations | Selenium Tutorial

Supporting Additional Browsers and Browser Configurations

The Selenium API supports running against multiple browsers in addition to Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. See the SeleniumHQ.org website for supported browsers. In addition, when a browser is not directly supported, you may still run your Selenium tests against a browser of your choosing by using the “*custom” run-mode (i.e. in place of *firefox or *iexplore) when your test application starts the browser. With this, you pass in the path to the browsers executable within the API call as follows.
This can also be done from the Server in interactive mode.
cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*custom c: \P rogram Files \M ozilla Firefox \M yBrowser.exe&2=http://

Normally Selenium-RC automatically configures the browser, but if you launch the browser using the “*custom” run mode, you can force Selenium RC to launch the browser as-is, without using an automatic configuration.
For example, you can launch Firefox with a custom configuration like this:
cmd=getNewBrowserSession&1=*custom c: \P rogram Files \M ozilla Firefox \f irefox.exe&2=http://

Note that when launching the browser this way, you must manually configure the browser to use the Selenium Server as a proxy. Normally this just means opening your browser preferences and specifying “localhost:4444” as an HTTP proxy, but instructions for this can differ radically from browser to browser.
Consult your browser’s documentation for details.
Be aware that Mozilla browsers can vary in how they start and stop. One may need to set the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable to make Mozilla browsers behave a little more predictably.
Unix users should avoid launching the browser using a shell script; it’s generally better to use the binary executable (e.g. firefox-bin) directly.