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

I'm using Rails + Cucumber + Selenium Webdriver + PhantomJS, and I've been using a monkey-patched version of Selenium Webdriver, which keeps PhantomJS browser open between test runs. See this blog post: http://blog.sharetribe.com/2014/04/07/faster-cucumber-startup-keep-phantomjs-browser-open-between-tests/

See also my answer to this post: How do I execute a command on already opened browser from a ruby file