Automate Firefox with Python

Automate firefox with python?

The PyXPCOM extension is one possibility.

But looking at what firewatir provides, I have to 2nd the suggestion for twill. It's based on mechanize, which might also be useful in this context.

How to set up a Selenium Python environment for Firefox

As far as I understand, you want to develop in Python, using the Selenium library and work with the Firefox webdriver.

1. Install Python (Python 3 already contains pip)
2. Install Selenium (pip install selenium or some IDEs like PyCharm propose to install libraries, just import Selenium)
3. Download Mozilla webdriver
4. Enjoy!

Python: How to automate 'Allow' flash player content in Firefox?

"...The Allow button cannot be accessed via Selenium for instance because it is not a part of the website or a setting in Firefox. Does anyone know about a potential workaround?"

I don't know your OS but if it was my problem...

• Try to find a "key press" module to send the A key press into Firefox (ie: the Allow shortcut).

• Try to send a mouse-click at the coordinates of Allow button.

A good option to try is pyautogui. Once Flash is enabled by such module (clicker or presser) then you can involve Selenium for whatever you needed to do in the enabled Flash.

How can I make a Selenium script undetectable using GeckoDriver and Firefox through Python?

The fact that selenium driven Firefox / GeckoDriver gets detected doesn't depends on any specific GeckoDriver or Firefox version. The Websites themselves can detect the network traffic and can identify the Browser Client i.e. Web Browser as WebDriver controled.

As per the documentation of the WebDriver Interface in the latest editor's draft of WebDriver - W3C Living Document the webdriver-active flag which is initially set as false, is set to true when the user agent is under remote control i.e. when controlled through Selenium.

Now that the NavigatorAutomationInformation interface should not be exposed on WorkerNavigator.

So,

webdriver
    Returns true if webdriver-active flag is set, false otherwise.

where as,

navigator.webdriver
    Defines a standard way for co-operating user agents to inform the document that it is controlled by WebDriver, for example so that alternate code paths can be triggered during automation.

So, the bottom line is:

Selenium identifies itself

---

However some generic approaches to avoid getting detected while web-scraping are as follows:

• The first and foremost attribute a website can determine your script/program is through your monitor size. So it is recommended not to use the conventional Viewport.
• If you need to send multiple requests to a website, you need to keep on changing the User Agent on each request. Here you can find a detailed discussion on Way to change Google Chrome user agent in Selenium?
• To simulate human like behavior you may require to slow down the script execution even beyond WebDriverWait and expected_conditions inducing time.sleep(secs). Here you can find a detailed discussion on How to sleep webdriver in python for milliseconds

How to automate the activation of Flash plug-in using selenium firefox geckodriver?

With Firefox >= 69, you won't be able to do that:

The setting to always activate the Adobe Flash plugin was removed in
Firefox 69. See this compatibility document
for details.

---

Flash Player can no longer always be activated

Published: June 15, 2019

Categories: Plug-ins

Releases: Firefox 69

Description

As part of the ongoing Flash plug-in support deprecation, Firefox 69 has removed the “Always Activate” option from the page notification dialog and the “Remember this decision” option from the Add-on Manager. It means, from now on, Firefox will ask the user every time if they want to show Flash content on a website during a browser session, and the user won’t be able to change this behaviour.

At the time of this writing, only half of Firefox users have Flash Player installed according to Firefox Public Data Report, and the number is steadily decreasing. Given that the Flash support will be removed from Firefox and other browsers in 2020, you are strongly encouraged to make a migration plan as soon as possible if your site still relies on any Flash content including legacy video players.

Browser automation: Python + Firefox using PyXPCOM

I've used webdriver with firefox. I was very pleased with it.

As for the code examples, this will get you started.

How to not get the Chrome is being controlled by automated software on Firefox when using Selenium?

You can't remove this label, but you can load profile as it was shown here e.g.

How do you use credentials saved by the browser in auto login script in python 2.7?

In this topic, there are Chrome and Firefox examples

---

Related Topics