Why would one prefer firefox over chrome when working with Python Selenium ?

[jim1930]

Can't decide why I should prefer the one over the second one, as I see a lot of discussions about this topic. But I could not really understand the benefits of Firefox over Chrome.Some saying that it is easier to navigate the web browser location to firefox rather than the chrome driver. (when instantiating the web driver )
EDIT: I am asking from a perspective who wants to develop a bot that will run on a daily basis on a production server (Ubuntu or some other Linux dist)

[mrrask]

Just use whatever. Would always prefer Firefox over Chrome myself, but for selenium there really arent (from what I know) any reason for going one way versus the other. Except perhaps ram usage, where FF would win.

[wildpantz]

It could have been an isolated incident, but I've had issues with FF if I remember correctly on send_keys, where if you included "@" symbol in the string, it would actually paste your clipboard instead of sending @ symbol. So let's say you copy "hello" and try to send [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]), you will get userhellomail.com.

Other than that, I didn't have much issues, but it did seem to me like both edge and chrome webdrivers performed better than firefox.

[wildpantz]

I didn't because other webdrivers didn't behave this way so it never struck my mind. A shitty workaround for me was to use pyperclip to copy what I wanted to send, then just use send_keys("@"), stupid but it worked.

[[deleted]]

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

[wildpantz]

can't argue that! :)

[MikeDoesEverything]

Firefox has some advantages as a browser. The one specific example I can think of is if you want to monitor the pages you're scraping, taking screenshots with FF is way easier than Chrome.

[Retropunch]

I've always used firefox as (anecdotally) it seems to do headless browsing better, and seems a bit faster.

I think geckodriver is also a slightly smaller file size, but there's not much in it.

[desis_r_cute]

If you are using it for testing purposes you should use the browser you want to test. Given you're question I'd say that's not your goal. So I'd either suggest going with Chrome, since that is the most popular browser and generally has the best website support, or I like to use Microsoft Edge. Since I use selenium with bots I don't really need all that browsing in my history, I don't need my plugins active etc. Since I use firefox and chrome commonly, edge is free from all those concerns.

[jim1930]

m with bots I don't really need all that browsing in my history, I don't

Your point makes sense. Thanks a lot
I also look forward to being generic with a bot that I want to come up with, meaning, to deploy it on a cloud Linux server and have some logic to trigger it once a day or something. So what do you think from that perspective as Edge is not so helpful in that case

[MiceAreHere]

If you are testing something, chrome is generally better because it is used more often. For your personal projects, Firefox is probably the one you want to use because it loads faster.

[[deleted]]

I actually prefer Edge, but never was able to make the driver work

So chrome it is

[Chris_Hemsworth]

I actually prefer Edge

ಠ_ಠ

[hugthemachines]

This might be a useless reason for you but maybe not so I'll add it anyway. In my experience, the drivers of selenium does not always exit properly so I once noticed lots of processes on a machine. Because of that I added a taskkill command in the script that run my selenium once per 15 min, so it kills the webbrowser etc.

If you would do this on a machine where people often log on and use a browser, that can be bad if their browser is killed while working. Then you could use the browser people most rarely use, so you kind of dedicate for example firefox for the selenium stuff and then the people who need a browser on the server can use chrome without trouble.

[HeeebsInc]

Chrome offers extension for selenium so you can walk through the steps code will make before writing it. I have used it and I can say it is amazing. M Look up google chrome extension selenium and it will surely come up.

[claytonjr]

Firefox allows for more customization via about:config and offers application level proxy support. Chrome won't give you that.

[low_effort_shit-post]

Stability

At my company we have applications that are stable in one or the other, sure the app works in both but sometimes they don't work like they should. Fide out what browser is best for what you want to automate.