Firebug and Selenium: Performance

Question

I'm a big fan of Firebug - I use it all the time for my web development needs. That said, one of the things I noticed with Firebug is that it significantly slows down the page. In particular, if Firebug is on when a (local) Selenium script is running, the script takes 2-3 times as long to execute, and I sometimes even see timeout errors. Their per-site activation model doesn't help here at all - I'm developing and testing that same site.

I'd like to be able to turn Firebug OFF right before my Selenium script starts, and turn it back on when Selenium is done (or, in the worst case, just keep it off - the biggest annoyance is launching Selenium only to find out that some tests failed for no apparent reason).

Answer 1

My favored solution for this is to make a new, separate Firefox profile (run firefox -ProfileManager), and launch your Selenium scripts using that profile instead. It'll be clean of everything except what you put into it. That way, as little as possible from your personal environment will taint your development environment and you'll maintain a clean separation.

Answer 2

I typically don't run tests from the same machine I develop on. If you can setup a separate test machine where you deploy and run the tests, you can keep Firefox, IE, etc, free of plugins/add-ons like firebug that might get in the way of your tests and avoid this problem completely.

Running your tests on a separate machine also frees your dev machine so that you can continue working while your tests are running. I'm not sure about your situation specifically, but think about when you have hundreds or thousands of test cases running, you don't want to be sitting there waiting for them to finish. You want to be able to work while it runs, view the report it generates, and investigate if necessary.

Answer 3

You could try the alpha builds of Firebug 1.4. The activation/suspend model has changed in this version to a simpler model: it is activated when you see the panel, otherwise it is in suspended mode, see http://blog.getfirebug.com/?p=124 for more information.