Selenium hangs instantiating FirefoxDriver

Question

I try to get started with selenium (downloaded the current version today) and copied their example which opens a browser and performs a google search.

However, the progr

Answer 1

Normally a new browser's hot - I was looking for a problem elsewhere. Webdriver or selenium server. http://d.pr/i/Q5Dt

Answer 2

Firefox 13 support was added in Selenium 2.23. See http://code.google.com/p/selenium/source/browse/trunk/java/CHANGELOG

Answer 3

Saw this behavior when trying to instantiate the webdriver on a headless CentOS server without display being set.

Per https://serverfault.com/questions/363827/how-can-i-run-firefox-on-centos-with-no-display -- you can use Xvfb, which gives you an X server that doesn't require connection to a physical display

Answer 4

I've been working OK with Firefox 18, but I just got auto-updated to 19 which seems to break the webdriver. Mozilla isn't prominent with the links to prior versions:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/18.0b7/mac/en-US/

Answer 5

These cases are usually when Firefox & Selenium are a little "out of sync" in terms of compatibility.

You should try two things: update Selenium to the latest one and/or downgrade Firefox. Keeping an eye on the Selenium Release Notes