Question

I’m a big fan of Firebug – I use it all the time for my web development needs. That said, one of the things I noticed with Firebug is that it significantly slows down the page. In particular, if Firebug is on when a (local) Selenium script is running, the script takes 2-3 times as long to execute, and I sometimes even see timeout errors. Their per-site activation model doesn’t help here at all – I’m developing and testing that same site.

I’d like to be able to turn Firebug OFF right before my Selenium script starts, and turn it back on when Selenium is done (or, in the worst case, just keep it off – the biggest annoyance is launching Selenium only to find out that some tests failed for no apparent reason).

Answer 1

My favored solution for this is to make a new, separate Firefox profile (run firefox -ProfileManager), and launch your Selenium scripts using that profile instead. It’ll be clean of everything except what you put into it. That way, as little as possible from your personal environment will taint your development environment and you’ll maintain a clean separation.