Heightened privilege selenium browsers on Windows 7 (x64)

Question

I make use of *firefox and *iexplore etc. within my selenium tests to get around the issue of self-signed SSL certificates on my local machine. Unfortunately, now that I've moved from XP over to 7, this seems to have stopped working.

I'm running the selenium RC server process as administrator, since that was necessary to get an IE instance to launch properly.

I've tried adding permanent security exceptions for the certificate in question, and have confirmed that this works when I myself launch a browser session. But when a browser session is instantiated by the Selenium RC, I'm still receiving the security warnings.

I've also tried specifying the 32bit version of IE, in case it was just the 64bit version that wasn't working, but both exhibit the same behaviour.

I've also tried temporarily disabled UAC, in case I was falling foul of a permissions/elevation problem, but that also did not help.

Has anybody managed to get the heightened privilege browsers working properly on Windows 7? Alternatively, does anybody know a way that I can get around this issue? (short of not using https!)

Thanks!

Answer 1

*chrome is normally the way to run Firefox with relaxed security.

Answer 2

Have you tried adding the certificate to your list of accepted certificates by hand? As IE doesn't have profiles, and each session uses the user's profile, you can add the certificate by hand the first time the error occurs to Selenium and next time the browser finds an error to warn, it will find the cert in the list of exceptions and proceed with the page without warning.

Answer 3

For Firefox, the best way to get around this is to create a custom profile with all the certificates accepted, then specify that profile when you start your Selenium server. I use this same strategy for setting up browsers in different languages.