Update to using WebDriver / Selenum 2.0 with Safari

Around this time last year I wrote an article about using Safari with WebDriver. You can find this article at http://darrellgrainger.blogspot.com/2011/02/using-selenium-20-with-webdriver-and.html.

It has been a year and there is still no SafariDriver which extends WebDriver. Unfortunately, Safari 5.0 and 5.1 have hit the market and the Selenium 1.0 "*safari" driver is no longer working. As the Selenium look at dropping support for older web browsers they are also looking into supporting things like Safari 5.x.

Ideally, I would like to see:

    WebDriver driver = new SafariDriver();


or

    URL hub = new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub");
    DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.safari();
    WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(hub, dc);


Until this happens, we'll have to rely on using Selenium 1.0 to create an instance of Safari. But if "*safari" is no longer working and there are no plans to update it, what do we do? The solution appears to be use "*safariproxy" instead.

Looking at the code for SeleneseCommandExecutor() there are two constructors. The first takes as input a Selenium instance. The second takes as input a CommandProcessor. The second constructor actually calls the first constructor. So either method will work. So here it is:

    String baseURL = "http://www.google.com";
    Selenium sel = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*safariproxy", baseURL);
    CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor(sel);
    DesiredCapabilities dc = new DesiredCapabilities();
    WebDriver browser = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, dc);


or

    String baseURL = "http://www.google.com";
    CommandProcessor cp = new HttpCommandProcessor("localhost", 4444, "*safariproxy", baseURL);
    CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor(sel);
    DesiredCapabilities dc = new DesiredCapabilities();
    WebDriver browser = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, dc);


Additionally, if the browser cannot be found, i.e. it is not in the default locations, then you can specific the path to the Safari executable using:


    "*safariproxy /Application/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari"


This code is untested but hopefully better then the previous example.

Happy automating.

.