Advanced User Interactions and the expletive machine

For the life of me, I could not get User Interactions to work properly. They just wouldn’t work. They used to work, last time I tried them. But now…

new Actions(driver).keyDown(Keys.CONTROL).
                            sendKeys("b").
                            keyUp(Keys.CONTROL).
                            perform();

”!*&^*&£$“, as old comics used to illustrate the expletive.

I found I wasn’t alone on the forums.

I used a simple user interactions experimental page which had enough to let me see what was happening:

key_click_display.html

Then I wrote the offending parts of the test code in a new test that I could run cross browser. You can find it in the WebDriverExperiments over on github.

And lo, on my machine, with the way I was starting the browsers, with my version of Selenium and the versions of the browsers I installed…

I got results I didn’t expect…

It worked.

”!*&^*&£$“, as old comics used to illustrate the expletive.

Wait a minute. Did you see that? That warning about firecookie now being part of firebug? I think Firefox just updated itself!

Hmmm, let me check my smaller laptop – Hey, that is running Firefox 11.0. Blink. Hey, it just updated to 14.0.1.

I had the most recent version of WebDriver, but an out of date version of Firefox.

OK, now I have to stop that happening ever again.

Lessons learned.

• I better start reading the forums more closely. I bet someone already found this out.
• Next time, when I update WebDriver, I have to force a manual download of the updated version of Firefox. None of this relying on the automated update stuff. Who trusts automation anyway?