Easier way to restart Firefox

[marco-c]

Currently, if you want to restart Firefox, you need to create a new Firefox.Binary instance.
Moreover, I can't find a simple way to keep the same profile.

[ddavison]

This is a question rather than an issue. Please send questions to the selenium user group

For issues please provide a concise reproducible test case and describe what results you are seeing and what results you expect.

See CONTRIBUTING.md

[marco-c]

Here's an example of the issue I've filed. Let's say you use a startBrowser function to restart a browser (after driver.close and driver.quit).

This works, because it creates a new instance of Firefox.Binary:

function startBrowser() {
  var firefoxBinary = new firefox.Binary(firefoxBinaryPath);
  var firefoxOptions = new firefox.Options().setBinary(firefoxBinary);
  var builder = new webdriver.Builder()
    .forBrowser('firefox')
    .setFirefoxOptions(firefoxOptions);
  var driver = builder.build();
}

This doesn't work, because it doesn't use a new instance of Firefox.Binary:

var firefoxBinary = new firefox.Binary(firefoxBinaryPath);
var firefoxOptions = new firefox.Options().setBinary(firefoxBinary);
var builder = new webdriver.Builder()
  .forBrowser('firefox')
  .setFirefoxOptions(firefoxOptions);
function startBrowser() {
  var driver = builder.build();
}

The second option fails because in firefox/binary.js there's this code:

Binary.prototype.launch = function(profile) {
  if (this.command_) {
    throw Error('Firefox is already running');
  }

The command_ property is set in the Binary class, but never reset to null, so it will never allow you to restart the browser.

[marco-c]

So, to make it short, Binary::launch fails even if Firefox isn't running.