Patch to FireWatir and jssh to support testing with multiple concurrent Firefox browsers

With these patches you can now run two different firefox browsers with different profiles (and thus different sets of cookies) concurrently. This means if you are writing a test for an application that might require you to log in through two different user accounts (e.g. a facebook app), you can make your tests run a lot faster since you won’t have to constantly log in and log out of each user. By using two browsers you can reduce the number of steps your tests take so they run faster. For example:

- login to user1
- do something with user1
- logout user1/login user2
- do something with user2
- logout user2/login user 1
- do something with user1
- etc…

versus

- browser 1: login to user1
- browser 2: login to user2
- b1: do something with user1
- b2: do something with user2
- b1: do something with user1

Here’s an example of a test using two browsers, this logs in to two different facebook accounts at the same time:

require 'firewatir'

t1 = Thread.new do
  ff1 = FireWatir::Firefox.new(:port => 10001, :profile => 'watir1')
  ff1.goto 'facebook.com'

  ff1.text_field(:id, 'email').value = "tester1@gmail.com"
  ff1.text_field(:id, 'pass').value = "tester1"
  ff1.button(:id, 'doquicklogin').click
end

t2 = Thread.new do
  ff2 = FireWatir::Firefox.new(:port => 10002, :profile => 'watir2')
  ff2.goto 'facebook.com'

  ff2.text_field(:id, 'email').value = "tester2@gmail.com"
  ff2.text_field(:id, 'pass').value = "tester1"
  ff2.button(:id, 'doquicklogin').click
end

t1.join
t2.join

How to do it

There are two patches you need to apply. One to FireWatir, one to the jssh firefox extension. The jssh patch allows you to specify a port number for jssh to listen on with a command line option: firefox -jssh port#. Previously jssh always listened on port 9997 (unless you edited the config file). The FireWatir patch gets rid of some ugly global variables which prevented you from using more than one browser. It also allows you to specify the jssh port when initializing a Firefox browser object.

Apply the FireWatir patch to the svn trunk (rev. 123)
Apply the jssh patch to components/nsJSShStarter.js in your jssh extension directory

FireWatir patch note: use the attachment (link is at the top) not the actual syntax highlighted text
FireWatir gem after patching
jssh patch
patched jssh XPI for linux
patched jssh XPI for windows
patched jssh XPI for darwin

Update

I updated the FireWatir patch so that it uses the -no-remote command line option in Windows so that you can run two instances simultaneously.

Update

I uploaded a patched FireWatir gem and patched XPIs for jSSH