Selenium 3 - Launching firefox browser using Geckodriver

The first example that we will look into is launching firefox using the Geckodriver. When using Selenium 3 , you have to download geckodriver. Just like the other drivers available to Selenium, Mozilla has released geckodriver executable that will run alongside the browser.

You can download the latest executable on the GitHub page. Now you need to specify the system property with the path

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver","path of geckodriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

Below is the code to set GeckoDriver path on Mac OS X for Selenium WebDriver

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/Users/username/Downloads/geckodriver");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

What is GeckoDriver?

A Proxy for using W3C WebDriver-compatible clients to interact with Gecko-based browsers. Geckodriver provides HTTP API described by the WebDriver protocol to communicate with Gecko browsers, such as Firefox (Version after 47).

Marionette (the next generation of FirefoxDriver) is turned on by default from Selenium 3. Even if you are working with older versions of Firefox browser, Selenium 3 expects you to set path to the driver executable by the webdriver.gecko.driver.

Click here For more details on Marionette

Note: If you are using Selenium version below 2.xx, you don't need gecko additional driver. You can downloaded selenium-server-standalone-2.53.1.jar from download selenium 2.53.1

If you are not doing so, it will throw exception "java.lang.IllegalStateException: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.gecko.driver system property;"

java.lang.IllegalStateException: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.gecko.driver system property; for more information, see https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver. The latest version can be downloaded from https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
	at com.google.common.base.Preconditions.checkState(Preconditions.java:199)
	at org.openqa.selenium.remote.service.DriverService.findExecutable(DriverService.java:109)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.GeckoDriverService.access$100(GeckoDriverService.java:38)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.GeckoDriverService$Builder.findDefaultExecutable(GeckoDriverService.java:91)
	at org.openqa.selenium.remote.service.DriverService$Builder.build(DriverService.java:296)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver.createCommandExecutor(FirefoxDriver.java:245)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver.<init>(FirefoxDriver.java:220)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver.<init>(FirefoxDriver.java:215)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver.<init>(FirefoxDriver.java:211)
	at org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver.<init>(FirefoxDriver.java:124)
The other important changes in Selenium 3.x are listed below:

* Minimum java version is now 8+
* The original RC APIs are only available via the leg-rc package.
* To run exported IDE tests, ensure that the leg-rc package is on the classpath.
* Support for Firefox is via Mozilla's geckodriver.
* Support for Edge is provided by MS:
* Official support for IE requires version 9 or above
* New html-table runner backed by WebDriver.
* Unused command line arguments are now no longer parsed.

Now let us see the example to launch firefox browser with Selenium 3 using gecko driver.

package com.test;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class ExampleThree {
	
	String driverPath = "<path to gecko driver executable>";
	public WebDriver driver;
	
	@Test
	public void launchBrowser() {
		System.out.println("launching firefox browser"); 
		System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", driverPath+"geckodriver.exe");
		driver = new FirefoxDriver();
	}

	@Test
	public void openApplication() {
		driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");
	}
	
	@Test
	public void closeDriver() {
		if(driver!=null) {
			driver.close();
		}
	}
}

To run tests on remote machines, WebDriver has to use the instance of the RemoteWebDriver and DesiredCapabilities in order to specify browser name, version and platform to execute tests.

Generally to run tests on our local machine, we will just specify as WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(); to run on Firefox browser.

To execute tests on remote machine, we need to use remotewebdriver, below is the sample code to execute your tests on remote machine with Firefox gecko driver

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", driverPath+"geckodriver.exe");
DesiredCapabilities capabilities=DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
capabilities.setCapability("marionette", true);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(capabilities);

The above code is verified with selenium-server-standalone-3.0.0-beta2 and Firefox 48 version. Please let me know if you have any issues.

In your Maven project, just add / update the following selenium dependency to your pom.xml:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
        <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
        <version>3.0.0-beta2</version>
    </dependency>  

When working with selenium grid and if you want your tests to run on Firefox with Selenium version 3.x.x, then we need to provide path to gecko driver executable. Detailed information on Selenium Nodes configuartion using JSON for Firefox gecko driver

The most common issue people are facing with latest versions of Firefox is org.openqa.selenium.firefox.NotConnectedException: Unable to connect to host 127.0.0.1 on port 7055 after 45000 ms.

Users who are facing the above problem, Please use Marionette (geckodriver).

Please do comment your issue / observation with the versions (Selenium, Firefox and Geckodriver) that you have used.

UPDATE on geckodriver windows 32bit issues

Sep 1, 2016 3:07:19 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession
INFO: Attempting bi-dialect session, assuming Postel's Law holds true on the remote end

If you are facing an issue like org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession with geckodriver windows 32bit , Please check for an update of the issue here and check the last comment made by 'Andreas Tolfsen'. Once all the issues fixed in the milestone they will soon be releasing Geckodriver v0.11.

UPDATE:
Now you should be able to download gecko driver version 0.11 which will resolve windows32 bit issues.

Selenium Tutorials: 

Comments

It works.

can you pl explain this

The most common issue people are facing with latest versions of Firefox is org.openqa.selenium.firefox.NotConnectedException: Unable to connect to host 127.0.0.1 on port 7055 after 45000 ms.

Users who are facing the above problem, Please use Marionette (geckodriver).

Marionette is turned on by default from Selenium 3. In order to driver your tests on firefox browser, use Marionette which is Mozilla version of FirefoxDriver

There was a change in latest versions of Firefox starting from v47, where Selenium starts the browser and it crashes.

Just make sure that the version of the libraries that you are using are compatible with the version of Firefox you are running. You need to be quite careful about your versions.

For me It works!

But the issue is with the console prints after the output.

Below is the sample of the console prints after the output is been displayed :

[Child 9152] ###!!! ABORT: Aborting on channel error.: file c:/builds/moz2_slave/m-rel-w32-00000000000000000000/build/src/ipc/glue/MessageChannel.cpp, line 2027
Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.remote.UnreachableBrowserException: Error communicating with the remote browser. It may have died.

Please understand me this,
Thanks in advance!

Same is happening with me also. Please help

Same is happening with me also when I use quit().
Even if main parts of the tests are ok, they failed because of this
Thanks in advance

When I download the firefox driver for mac os and using selenium 3.0 "webdriver.gecko.driver" is working as command line. without opening browser it is running the script. How I can I open the browser see execution using webdriver.gecko.driver.
Please provide the steps run in mac os

Just give this in setpropery

System.setProperty("webdriver.firefox.marionette",gecko driver path);

Hi,

How to use this geckodriver.exe on Linux machines.

Thanks,
Nived.

I did the same thing ...
but not working.

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