Firefox Build does not work with Selenium

Question

For my research, I did some source code modifications in firefox and build it myself. In order to automate testing, I opted to use Selenium but unfortunately, my newly built Firefox seem to not support Selenium.

I did the following:

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary

binary = FirefoxBinary("/path/to/firefox/binary")

d = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)

d.get("http://www.google.de")

The Firefox does open and is responsive (I can enter a website in the search bar). But after a while, the python script crashes with the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "firefox.py", line 7, in <module>

    d = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)

  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 59, in __init__

    self.binary, timeout),

  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.py", line 47, in __init__

self.binary.launch_browser(self.profile)

  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 66, in launch_browser

    self._wait_until_connectable()

  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 109, in _wait_until_connectable

    raise WebDriverException("Can't load the profile. Profile "

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: Can't load the profile. Profile Dir: %s If you specified a log_file in the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.

I did google that error message and most solutions suggested, that I should Update Selenium since it does not support the Firefox version used. Unfortunately, I installed the newest version of selenium (2.44.0) and I even used an older version of Firefox (version 33) to rule out that point.

I also made sure that my code modifications are not the reason for this to crash by building a clean, unmodified firefox. Selenium doesn't work with this firefox either.

If I don't specify a firefox binary and let Selenium use the installed Firefox, everything works fine. So my guess is, that something is wrong with the firefox build, which I did exactly as mentioned in the online documentation (e.g. ./mach build).

Has anyone an idea, what my mistake might be? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Some setup information:

Firefox 33

Selenium 2.44.0

Python 3.4 (also tried 2.7, doesn't work either)

Firefox build with Ubuntu 14.04

Answer 1

Ubuntu 14.04, firefox 36.0, selenium 2.44.0. The same problem was solved by:

sudo pip install -U selenium

Selenium 2.45.0 is OK with FF36.

Update: Selenium 2.53+ is compatible with FF45

You can get older FF versions here