Firefox, Selenium GXT and the nasty Quick Find Links Only

So I have seen this intermittent error with my selenium tests that drives me up the wall. I'll be running a test and all of a sudden a little "Quick Find" box shows up in the lower left corner in Firefox (not the same as CTRL-F). This appears to be some sort of "old feature" of firefox that is used to quickly find links or something in the page (people have complained about it since Firefox 1.0). If you google the term "firefox quick find links only" you'll see the issue. Basically if you are in a non-input field (like the page) and type either "/" or "'" it will invoke this. The problem is, in GXT with selenium in order for some values to be input, events need to be raised by my selenium tests to blur/focus etc. Even though I am not typing in an apostrophe or slash, some sequence will trigger this control. Usually it was during the typing in a text field after clearing it and the first character (or in the case of my tree filter the 8th character?) would be dropped. It turns out, a solution that appears to work is the use of a Firefox plugin to turn off this widget/control (not sure why there is not a setting to do it by default - since I am sure most people do not even know the functionality is there).

There is a solution for this, but in order to use it you'll want to setup Firefox and Selenium to use a custom profile (since you have to install this plugin). To do so, start firefox with the -profileManager argument (ie. firefox -profilemanager). Be sure not to have any instances running when you do this (or else it will be ignored). When the profile manager shows up:

1. uncheck the "don't ask at startup" - we'll restore this later
2. choose to create a new profile
3. give your profile a name like "selenium" and click the choose folder. Before going further write down this path as you will need it along with the profile name. On Windows 7, mine would be c:\users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\FireFox\Profiles.
4. Launch Firefox using this profile.
5. Go to your favorite website (like my blog). Without clicking in a textfield, hit the button "/". If you see a Quick Find show up, the next should help disable this.
6. The process to disable the Quick find is documented here. In particular you'll need to download the plugin and install it to Firefox (on Windows is .xpi is not mapped to firefox choose to pick a file and choose firefox). Once installed, follow the instructions.
7. After "disabling" it, try step 5 again and this time the Quick Find should not show up.
8. Now you have a Firefox that will run the selenium tests without Quick Find, but selenium is not using it. The next step is to modify your selenium startup script (if you are running it by typing java -jar selenium-server.jar write a script!. In the script, add the flag -firefoxProfileTemplate path_to_profile_above\profile_name to the end of the command. This will use your custom profile for executing the tests.
9. Finally, close down firefox and launch it again. This time checkoff the "Don't ask at startup" and choose your regular profile and you are off back using firefox with your profile.