I was having the save issue. I assume you made sure your java server was running before you started your python script? The java server can be downloaded from selenium's download list.
When I did a netstat to evaluate the open ports, i noticed that the java server wasn't running on the specific "localhost"
host:
When I started the server, I found that the port number was 4444 :
$ java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.35.0.jar
Sep 24, 2013 10:18:57 PM org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher main
INFO: Launching a standalone server
22:19:03.393 INFO - Java: Apple Inc. 20.51-b01-456
22:19:03.394 INFO - OS: Mac OS X 10.8.5 x86_64
22:19:03.418 INFO - v2.35.0, with Core v2.35.0. Built from revision c916b9d
22:19:03.681 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub
22:19:03.683 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x
22:19:03.683 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver]
22:19:03.685 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server]
22:19:03.685 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/]
22:19:03.755 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler@21b64e6a
22:19:03.755 INFO - Started HttpContext[/wd,/wd]
22:19:03.765 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444
I was able to view my listening ports and their port numbers(the -n option) by running the following command in the terminal:
$netstat -an | egrep 'Proto|LISTEN'
This got me the following output
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp46 0 0 *.4444 *.* LISTEN
I realized this may be a problem, because selenium's socket utils, found in: webdriver/common/utils.py are trying to connect via "localhost" or 127.0.0.1:
socket_.connect(("localhost", port))
once I changed the "localhost" to '' (empty single quotes to represent all local addresses), it started working. So now, the previous line from utils.py looks like this:
socket_.connect(('', port))
I am using MacOs and Firefox 22. The latest version of Firefox at the time of this post is 24, but I heard there are some security issues with the version that may block some of selenium's functionality (I have not verified this). Regardless, for this reason, I am using the older version of Firefox.