This article provides a detailed, step by step guide on how to launch Firefox with Selenium Geckodriver. In this article we use the latest versions of Selenium, Firefox & Geckodriver and show you how you can launch Firefox by providing updated code snippets. The tool versions that we will be using in this article are –. Selenium – version 3.11.0. Firefox – version 59.0.2 (Firefox Quantum). Geckodriver – version 0.20.1 Are you using an older version of Selenium Webdriver?
![Driver Driver](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125370759/446738922.png)
![Download Gecko Driver For Firefox Download Gecko Driver For Firefox](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125370759/774263130.jpg)
Gecko Driver – Launching Firefox Browser In Selenium 3. Selenium WebDriver supports browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari etc. Download the latest release of Gecko driver and unzip the downloaded compressed file and keep it somewhere on a known location on your system.
Make sure you switch to the to avoid compatibility issues!! What is Selenium Geckodriver? Let us first start with the very basics – What is Gecko and GeckoDriver?
Gecko is a web browser engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, most noticeably the Firefox web browser, its mobile version other than iOS devices, their email client Thunderbird and many other open source software projects. You can get more information about Gecko here – Geckodriver is a proxy for using W3C WebDriver-compatible clients to interact with Gecko-based browsers i.e. Mozilla Firefox in this case.
This program provides the HTTP API described by the WebDriver protocol to communicate with Gecko browsers. It translates calls into the Marionette automation protocol by acting as a proxy between the local and remote ends.
How things worked before Geckodriver and Selenium 3 If you are new to Selenium and you have started directly with Selenium 3.x, you would not know how Firefox was launched with the previous versions of Selenium (version 2.53 and before). It was a pretty straight forward process where you were not required to use Geckodriver or any other driver. After you, you just write the code to instantiate the WebDriver and open Firefox. The code snippet is shown below –. If you just run this code, you would notice that Firefox browser would get opened and Google.com would be displayed in the browser. This is how it worked with Selenium 2.53 and before.
Let’s see whats the new implementation in Selenium 3. What happens when you don’t use Firefox Geckodriver with Selenium 3.x To try this out, all that you need to do is point your JAR files to the latest version of Selenium 3 and then run the same code that is given above.
You will now notice that Google.com page would not open in a new Firefox window. Instead you will see an error message as shown below – java.lang.IllegalStateException: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.gecko.driver system property; for more information, see The latest version can be downloaded from You will need to use Selenium Geckodriver to remove this error.
Let us see how this can be done. How to use Selenium Geckodriver to launch Firefox To launch Firefox with Selenium Geckodriver, you will first need to download Geckodriver and then set its path. This can be done in two ways as depicted in the below image – Check if Firefox is 32-bit or 64-bit There are two versions of Geckodriver for Windows: 32-bit and 64-bit. Based on whether your Firefox is 32-bit or 64-bit, you need to download the corresponding Geckodriver exe. In this section, you will first check whether your Firefox is 32-bit or 64-bit 1.
Open Firefox on your machine. Click on Hamburger icon from the right corner to open the menu as shown below 2. From this menu, click on Help icon (Help icon is marked in red box in the above image) 3. Once you click on Help icon, the Help Menu would be displayed 4. Click on About Firefox from the Help menu. About Mozilla Firefox popup would be displayed 5.
Note down whether Firefox is 32 or 64 bit. For us, Firefox is 64-bit as shown in the above image. Now close this popup and close Firefox as well.
Download the latest version of Selenium Geckodriver Follow the steps given below to download Geckodriver – 1. Open this Github page – 2. Download the latest release (windows version) based on whether your Firefox is 32-bit or 64-bit. We are downloading geckodriver-v0.20.1-win64.zip, as we have 64-bit Firefox 3.
Once the zip file is downloaded, unzip it to retrieve the driver – geckodriver.exe This completes the downloading process. Now let’s see how you can use it in your project. There are 2 methods using which you can configure this driver in your project. You can use any of these methods. According to this, Chrome is by far the most used browser. If you are learning Selenium, Launch Firefox Method 1: webdriver.gecko.driver system property With this method, you will have to add an additional line of code in your test case. Follow the steps given below to use this method – 1.
Copy the entire path where you unzipped geckodriver.exe. Let us assume that the location is – D: Firefox geckodriver.exe. You will need to add System.setProperty with the driver location to your code.
The code to launch Firefox browser would look like this – Important Note 1: In the folder paths in the below code, we have used double backslash ( ). This is because Java treats single back slash ( ) as an escape character. So you would need to use double back slash, everywhere you add some folder path. Important Note 2: If you are using older versions of Geckodriver (v0.16.1 or before), then you will also need to provide the Firefox Binary, otherwise you might get the below error – org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: Expected browser binary location, but unable to find binary in default location, no ‘moz:firefoxOptions.binary’ capability provided, and no binary flag set on the command line But please note that this is needed only for Geckodriver v0.16.1 or before. So for older Gecko versions, please use the below code where Firefox binary location has been provided using FirefoxOptions class.
Run this code to verify that everything is working fine. You will notice that google.com gets opened in new Firefox window Launch Firefox Method 2: Set property in Environment Variables 1. Copy the entire folder location where geckodriver.exe is saved. If the entire path is D: Firefox geckodriver.exe, then the folder location would be D: Firefox 2. Open Advanced tab in System Properties window as shown in below image.
Open Environment Variables window. In System variables section, select the Path variable (highlighted in the above image) and click on Edit button. Then add the location of Geckodriver that we copied in step 1 (D: Firefox ), to path variable (below image shows UI for Windows 10) 5. If you are using Windows 7, then move to the end of the Variable value field, then add a semi-colon (;) and then add the folder location as shown below (Semicolon acts as a separator between multiple values in the field) 6. Click on Ok button to close the windows. Once the path is set, you would not need to set the System property every time in the test script.
Your test script would simply look like this – For GeckoDriver v0.20, v0.19.0, v0.18.0 and v0.17.0 –.
Mozilla Firefox browser’s versions greater than 47.0 were not compatible with Selenium WebDriver 2.53.0 or 2.53.1 that means Firefox browsers version after 47.0 can’t be used in Selenium without any drivers. As of version 3.0, the Selenium uses a driver to form a link with Firefox browser. This driver is known as Gecko Driver. Before starting with the GeckoDriver you need to understand what is GeckoDriver, why it is required in Selenium WebDriver?
Or how can it be used in Selenium? Let us start with the very basics. What is a Web Browser Engine and What is Gecko Driver? Is a software program that is used to control and enter the content such as HTML, CSS, XML, images etc.
On the browser and therefore it is also known as layout engine or rendering engine. It is a component of browsers and helps in displaying web-content. Is a web browser engine which is developed by Mozilla Foundation and is written in C. It is an open source engine which can be easily available for the user. GeckoDriver is a proxy which is used to interact with the browsers (such as Firefox) that run the Gecko browser engine.
GeckoDriver provides an HTTP API to communicate with Gecko browsers (like Firefox version 47 onwards). Why Selenium Needs Gecko Driver? Until Selenium version 2, it had Firefox driver which were used to interact with the Firefox browser (version till 47). Now, Firefox (with Firefox browser version 48 onwards) has done some changes and due to some security reasons, it does not allow any third party driver to directly interact with the browser.
Also Read: That means the user cannot use Firefox driver of selenium version 2 to interact with the browser version 48 onwards. Thus, we need Selenium 3 which has marionette drivers and with this user can directly interact with the Firefox browsers using a proxy which is GeckoDriver. Is an automation driver for Mozilla’s Gecko engine.
Getting Started with GeckoDriver This section will help you to install Selenium 3 Jars and GeckoDriver for Firefox browser. Below are the steps which you need to follow: Step 1: To Add Selenium 3 jars If you are using Selenium 2 jars, you can easily upgrade it to Selenium 3 Jars by following this link. Click on download option and you will find “Version 3.0.1” to download. Click on the link to download Selenium 3 jar. Now, copy this jar file by using ‘CTRL + C’ and go to your selenium tool.
You will find ‘lib folder’ in test explorer. Select ‘lib folder’ and right click to open options and select New Folder and set folder name as ‘selenium3jars’ to make it easily accessible or whatever name you want to use. You will see, the ‘selenium3jars’ folder is created as a children folder under ‘lib folder’. Use ‘CTRL + V’ to paste selenium 3 jar file that you copied earlier and paste inside ‘selenium3jars folder’. You’ll see the jar file has been successfully copied to the folder. Next thing you need to do is to add this jar file into your project. You need to select Selenium 3 jar file and right click to open the options palette.
Then left click on Build Path Add to Build Path to add jar file into your project easily. You’ll see that Selenium 3 jar has been added to Referenced libraries that mean your selenium is ready to execute the tests via the driver. Step 2: Installing Gecko Driver To download GeckoDriver for your WebDriver you need to follow this link. If you are running 32bit or 64bit Windows, MACOS, or Linux you can easily download the file which is compatible with your operating system. You’ll see many versions to download, but you can choose the latest version from the options.
You can easily download this zip file to your computer by clicking on the appropriate link. If you are using windows operating system, you can download either win32.zip or win64.zip and if you are using MAC operating system then you can choose macos.tar.zip. After downloading the zip file you can simply extract it in your preferred location and then copy the GeckoDriver.exe file using ‘CTRL + C’.
Again, you have to follow the same procedure to copy this file in the ‘lib folder’. Go to Selenium and select the lib directory from the test explorer.
Again, right-click to open option palette then left click on New Folder to create a new folder. Then set the name as ‘geckodriver’ or any other name which is easier for you to recognize and click ‘Finish’.
Then you have to add a GeckoDriver.exe file into the folder you have just created. After adding a geckodriver.exe file to a folder, the next step is to use the following syntax to show the exact location of the executable file. Syntax System.setProperty ( “webdriver.gecko.driver ”, ”location of gecko driver executable”); You need to enter the exact location of the executable file in the above syntax. To see the location of your file, you can select a geckodriver.exe file from the folder and right click to open the options palette. Then left click on the properties to open details. Select the location and copy all. Use this location address to enter this address in the syntax.
For instance: System.setProperty (“webdriver gecko driver”, “C:/Users/raghav/Desktop/Tools/Eclipse/Selenium/SeleniumTest/lib/geckodriver/geckodriver.exe”); If you find it difficult to add the location manually or showing any unwanted errors, you can also use an alternative method to add an executable file to your project. Go to your computer and search the above location in the file explorer.
Then copy the executable file from the downloaded folder to the current address location. Left click and drag the executable file from the download folder to the location of the searched folder. The dialogue box will appear saying to replace it or not. Click on replace button and copy the.exe file to the folder. Step 3: Adding Latest Version of Firefox Browser Download the latest version of Firefox by following this link In the next step, you need to add the syntax and also the location of this browser. Syntax System.setProperty ( “webdriver.Firefox.bin”, “Location of Firefox exe ”); Again, you need to enter this syntax in your selenium tool and also the exact location of the Firefox.exe file. To know the exact address of the.exe file you can select firefox.exe and right click to open option palette.
Then left click on properties to know the location. Copy the location and enter this address in the syntax.