Unable to open multiple IE sessions using selenium

[lukeis]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 463

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Lauch selenium server and create one selenium object with proper 
paramters. (DefaultSelenium selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 
4445, "*iexplore", "http://gmail.com");). Add the code to log into gmail 
account.
2. As per 'new session' feature in IE8 try to lauch another browser with 
same URL (http://gmail.com). 
3.Selenium overwrites the new URL on existing window

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Selenium shouls be able to open new session of IE8. Also user should be 
able to interact with this session using selenium.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
selenium-remote-control-1.0.3

Please provide any additional information below.
I want to create the new session for my application using IE8. I am using 
selenium + Java and I am able to lauch one session successfully by regular 
method.
There is new feature provided in IE8 using which one can create two 
different sessions of same application, say you want to have two Hotmail 
windows open, each logged into a different account. 

I want to lauch such two sessions using selenium for my application.

Reported by prasadcyb on 2010-04-13 09:20:40

[lukeis]

Selenium 2/WebDriver now provides the ability to launch several IE instances. We're
not doing any feature development on RC, so I suggest you try out the latest and greatest
if you need this functionality.

Reported by jari.bakken on 2011-01-27 02:50:52

• Status changed: WontFix

[lukeis]

I cannot get this to work either in Selenium 2, it is using the same session, can you
please provide details on how to start the selenium 2 server to get this working.

Reported by neil.buesing on 2011-01-28 17:28:34

[lukeis]

Ah, sorry - I was a bit quick in closing this. The new IE driver does support multiple
instances, but it's only supported in the .NET bindings at the moment. I'll make sure
it's fixed in the Ruby bindings for the next release, hopefully someone can pick up
Java as well in a reasonable time. 

Reported by jari.bakken on 2011-01-31 21:03:04

• Status changed: Accepted
• Labels added: Browser-IE, Component-WebDriver

[lukeis]

I'm in need for this in Java, so I will gladly attempt and implement it. Can you point
me to the difference between the C# and Java bindings which allow the first to open
multiple instances ?  

Reported by YuriKL on 2011-05-20 10:18:59

[lukeis]

Reported by barancev on 2011-11-06 19:13:41

[lukeis]

Issue 566 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2011-11-18 08:35:32

[lukeis]

Issue 3026 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2011-12-08 07:17:09

[lukeis]

Issue 3111 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2011-12-26 06:08:17

[lukeis]

I was looking at the difference in the C# and Java implementations of InternetExplorerDiverServer.
The C# bindings load the IEDriver.dll for every instance of IE driver. But the Java
code seems to be doing a static loading of IEDriver.dll - as shown here: https://gist.github.com/2507993.
Can someone confirm that this is indeed the reason why the Java bindings are unable
to handle two IE sessions at the same time?

Reported by sadiqalikm on 2012-04-27 10:02:26

[lukeis]

You should check the .NET bindings again. It doesn't load the library for every instance
of the InternetExplorerDriver class. Rather, they load the library if it's not already
loaded; however, on shutdown, the language binding queries the native library to see
if there are sessions still active, and only unloads the library if there are no more
sessions. This is still not ideal, because there are subtle race conditions that could
occur in a multithreaded environment. If you're looking at submitting a patch to fix
the problem for the Java bindings, I would encourage you to submit a patch that uses
the IE standalone server in a manner similar to the Chrome driver. Again, you can look
to the .NET bindings for example code how to accomplish this.

Reported by james.h.evans.jr on 2012-04-27 21:06:26

[lukeis]

Issue 3742 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2012-05-04 08:57:13

[lukeis]

Issue 2810 has been merged into this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2012-05-05 09:25:16

[lukeis]

Implemented in 2.22, as long as you're using the standalone IEDriverServer.exe

Reported by barancev on 2012-05-29 20:29:57

• Status changed: Fixed

[lukeis]

Reported by luke.semerau on 2015-09-17 17:48:58

• Labels added: Restrict-AddIssueComment-Commit