[🐛 Bug]: Firefox does not use the profile path when passed via options. Python

What happened?

It seems like firefox does not use the profile path when passed via options.

I have tried many different ways to set the profile.

Method 1 (Failing)

options.set_preference('profile', profile_path)

Method 2 (Failing)

profile = FirefoxProfile(profile_path)
options.profile = profile

Method 3 (Failing)

profile = FirefoxProfile(profile_path)
driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options, service=service, firefox_profile=profile)

All of these methods result in a temp profile being created somewhere else. This can be verified by looking at the geckodriver.log and seeing the profile path in the command.

The only way that does seem to work is passing it as an argument

Method 4 (Working)

options.add_argument("-profile")
options.add_argument(profile_path)

Setting the profile via the arguments is the only way it seems to use the profile_path. This can be verified by looking at the geckodriver.log and seeing the profile path in the command and also looking at the profile_path folder which gets populated by a bunch of files and folders.

How can we reproduce the issue?

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options as FirefoxOptions
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_profile import FirefoxProfile
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.service import Service as FirefoxService


profile_path = "D:\\test"
driver_path = "./src/drivers/geckodriver_win64.exe"

service = FirefoxService(driver_path)
options = FirefoxOptions()
options.add_argument("--log-level=3")
options.set_preference('profile', profile_path)

driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options, service=service)

Relevant log output

1663163281111	geckodriver	INFO	Listening on 127.0.0.1:49637
1663163281617	mozrunner::runner	INFO	Running command: "C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe" "--marionette" "--log-level=3" "--remote-debugging-port" "49638" "--remote-allow-hosts" "localhost" "-no-remote" "-profile" "C:\\Users\\AKSHAY~1.ARA\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\rust_mozprofileDsRaUY"
1663163282023	Marionette	INFO	Marionette enabled
console.warn: SearchSettings: "get: No settings file exists, new profile?" (new NotFoundError("Could not open the file at C:\\Users\\akshay.aradhya\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\rust_mozprofileDsRaUY\\search.json.mozlz4", (void 0)))

Operating System

Windows 10

Selenium version

Python 4.4.3

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Firefox

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

GeckoDriver 0.31.0

Are you using Selenium Grid?

No

[titusfortner]

Java recently stopped doing this in 7c4a0501 Though Ruby maintained a list of defaults to match what Selenium 3 was doing - https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/9138

[titusfortner]

Ok, dug into this and found the location of the actual issue at least.

The problem is that the FirefoxProfile class was not properly updated from the switch to geckodriver. Back when we used to have our own Firefox driver and it used the extension, it was managed by FirefoxProfile class, so it needed to set default values from a manifest. This is no longer needed.

Instead of just zipping the provided directory, the existing code wants to update things, and whatever it is dong to update them is breaking it. If this line gets commented out - https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/trunk/py/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_profile.py#L163

Then this code works as expected:

    options = webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
    options.profile = "/Users/titusfortner/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/1amwoj91.testing"
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(options=options)

Let me try deleting a bunch of things and see if everything we want to work still works. 😃