Can Selenium interact with an existing browser session?

Question

Does anybody know if Selenium (WebDriver preferably) is able to communicate with and act through a browser that is already running before launching a Selenium Client?

Answer 1

It is possible. But you have to hack it a little, there is a code What you have to do is to run stand alone server and "patch" RemoteWebDriver

public class CustomRemoteWebDriver : RemoteWebDriver
{
    public static bool newSession;
    public static string capPath = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "TestFiles", "tmp", "sessionCap");
    public static string sessiodIdPath = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "TestFiles", "tmp", "sessionid");

    public CustomRemoteWebDriver(Uri remoteAddress) 
        : base(remoteAddress, new DesiredCapabilities())
    {
    }

    protected override Response Execute(DriverCommand driverCommandToExecute, Dictionary parameters)
    {
        if (driverCommandToExecute == DriverCommand.NewSession)
        {
            if (!newSession)
            {
                var capText = File.ReadAllText(capPath);
                var sidText = File.ReadAllText(sessiodIdPath);

                var cap = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject>(capText);
                return new Response
                {
                    SessionId = sidText,
                    Value = cap
                };
            }
            else
            {
                var response = base.Execute(driverCommandToExecute, parameters);
                var dictionary = (Dictionary) response.Value;
                File.WriteAllText(capPath, JsonConvert.SerializeObject(dictionary));
                File.WriteAllText(sessiodIdPath, response.SessionId);
                return response;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            var response = base.Execute(driverCommandToExecute, parameters);
            return response;
        }
    }
}