Selenium: how to open a blank Firefox browser

Question

I am trying to write test cases in a Django project with Selenium. The statements used to open a Firefox browser are as follows:

class StudentTestCase(LiveServerTestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.browser = webdriver.Firefox()
        self.browser.implicitly_wait(2)

    def tearDown(self):
        self.browser.quit()

However, every time the Firefox browser opens, it tries to connect to https://www.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/42.0/firstrun/learnmore/, which takes a long time downloading a lot of stuff before the browser can be closed (it takes tens of seconds!).

There is a similar question, however, it is a Java solution, instead of a Python/Django one.

So, what's the Python/Django solution about opening a BLANK Firefox browser?

Possible duplicate of [Firefox webdriver opens first run page all the time](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33937067/firefox-webdriver-opens-first-run-page-all-the-time) — Hubert Grzeskowiak, Dec 09 '15 at 14:45
That's a Java solution. I am looking for a Python/Django solution. — Randy Tang, Dec 09 '15 at 15:00
@yltang52 the only difference is set_preference instead of setPreference — Hubert Grzeskowiak, Dec 09 '15 at 15:58

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '15 at 15:16

You do it by setting a profile with set_preference, see below:

>>> from selenium import webdriver
>>> profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile();
>>>
>>> profile.set_preference("browser.startup.homepage", "about:blank");
>>> profile.set_preference("startup.homepage_welcome_url", "about:blank");
>>> profile.set_preference("startup.homepage_welcome_url.additional", "about:blank");
>>>
>>> dr = webdriver.Firefox(profile)
>>> dr.title
u''

Selenium: how to open a blank Firefox browser

1 Answers1