Question

Hei

Is there a way to make Webdriver Firefox driver to run in the background?

We have a monitoring application which at regular intervals polls miscellaneous systems on different servers to check if they are running and responding as they should. To archive this we have made a small set of Selenium Webdriver tests.

We will have the application displaying on a big monitor in the maintainance departement, but it will look strange if Firefox is suddently popping up once in a while, is there a way to make it not run in a active window? Alternativly, is there a way for me to manipulate the browser size? Is there a way for me to determine where on the screen it should start (then I could make it start for example in the bottom right corner)

Answer 1

What’s triggering your Selenium/Webdriver tests?

I’ve set up Hudson as a Windows service before and the tests would run under the SYSTEM account instead of the currently logged in user account, so you wouldn’t see the tests running.

I think the most straightforward way of doing this though is to set up a small Selenium grid (http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/Grid2), and have those tests run remotely on another machine. They can still be triggered from your wherever the monitoring app is running; the only change will be where the tests run.