Upgrading to Selenium 3 With My First Selenium Project

Selenium 3 is out and you can read the big announcement here. It's available to start using now.

I’ll be checking my course against Selenium 3 later, but for the moment, here are the steps that you need to take to upgrade.

Upgrading to Selenium 3.0

Using startUsingSeleniumWebDriver as an example.

Change the pom.xml. 

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
            <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
            <version>2.53.1</version>
        </dependency>

This becomes:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
            <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.0</version>
        </dependency>

Ta-da!

Not Quite Ta-Da

For Marionette, we need to update to the most recent version, which can be found here. Note: Version 11.0.1 was used at the time of writing.

With Selenium 3, MarionetteDriver is deprecated. My test MyFirstTestFF48 uses MarionetteDriver. I can see that MarionetteDriver is deprecated, but it still works, provided that I have Marionette Geckodriver setup correctly.

It works if I install v 11.0.1 of Marionette Driver and have it named as geckodriver.exe on the path. However, I should migrate away from using MarionetteDriver in my code because it is deprecated.

Back to FirefoxDriver

FirefoxDriver now defaults to use the Marionette driver. So I can use Marionette by running my FirefoxDriver test, which uses Selenium 3, by default. Now:

• FirefoxDriver now uses Marionette.
• I no longer have to rename geckodriver.exe to wires.exe. 
• I now use geckodriver.exe. 

If you want to switch between 2.53.1 and 3.0.0, then I’d add the Marionette driver folder to the path and:

• Have Version 0.9.0 named as wires.exe. 
• Have Version 11.0.1 named as geckodriver.exe. 

My Firefox test, mvn test -Dtest=MyFirstTest, works if I install Version 11.0.1 of Marionette Driver and have it named as geckodriver.exe on the path and I use FirefoxDriver to instantiate the driver.

Firefox Marionette Summary:

To use Marionette geckodriver.exe for Firefox with Selenium 3:

• Install the latest version of geckodriver.exe here.
• Add geckodriver.exe to the path.
• Use FirefoxDriver in your code.

Legacy Firefox?

What if you want to use the built-in FirefoxDriver, i.e., for Firefox Extended Support Release or portable Firefox? Well, you still can! You just have to:

• Set the Firefox driver capability “Marionette” to false.
• Set the firefox_binary capability to the path of your Legacy Firefox.

For example:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
capabilities.setCapability("marionette", false);
capabilities.setCapability("firefox_binary",
       new File(System.getProperty("user.dir"),
       "/tools/FirefoxPortable/FirefoxPortable.exe").
              getAbsolutePath());
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(capabilities);

Work to Do

I have some work to do to update the startUsingSeleniumWebDriver and check my course tests against Selenium 3. If I have to update, anything I’ll blog about it.

Summary

• Update pom.xml to use <version>3.0.0</version>.
• Download the latest version ofgeckodriver.exe.
• Add geckodriver.exe to the path.
• Use FirefoxDriver in your code.
• Set the "Marionette" capability to false if you want to use legacy FirefoxDriver.