Selenium: reuse existing browser session, instead of opening new windows?

Question

This has been asked a million times on the web, but there's no clear cut answer. I tried "-browserSessionReuse" today without any luck; my tests keep spawning new browser windows.

X:\QA\Automation\SELENIUM_SERVER>java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.8.0.jar -log "log.txt" -browserSessionReuse -forcedBrowserMode "*googlechrome"
<snip>
13:42:25.923 INFO - Will recycle browser sessions when possible.

Maybe it's how I'm starting Selenium in my .py files?

sel = selenium('localhost', 4444, "*chrome", 'http://server/')
sel.start()

...perhaps I'm doing too many server starts?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is possible with Selenium 2 and WebDriver. I'm not sure if it is with different versions. In Selenium 2 with WebDriver you can call webDriver = new FirefoxDriver(); which spawns a browser, and that browser will stay open for the duration of your testing, or you can choose to close it with webDriver.Quit();. I like to close my browser window between tests so that I know my tests aren't "dirty" with stored session data that could affect how the tests run, but I can see value in some targeted tests where I want to try a couple different scenarios while keeping the same session going.

Answer 2

You can achieve it by using same selenium instance in multiple test. That requires some code design that controls start and stop selenium. We are using ISFW that provides a way using java so that's for sure it is possible with some efforts in python as well.