title: Selenium2 firefox: use the default profile
body: <p>Selenium2, by default, starts firefox with a fresh profile. I like that for a default, but for some good reasons (access to my bookmarks, saved passwords, use my add-ons, etc.) I want to start with my default profile.</p>
  
  <p>There is <a href="http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/FirefoxDriver" rel="nofollow noreferrer">supposed to be</a> a property controlling this but I think the docs are out of sync with the source, because as far as I can tell <code>webdriver.firefox.bin</code> is the only one that works. E.g. starting selenium with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin=not-there
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>works (i.e. it complains). But this has no effect:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=default
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>("default" is the name in profiles.ini, but I've also tried with "Profile0" which is the name of the section in profiles.ini).</p>
  
  <p>I'm using <a href="http://code.google.com/p/php-webdriver-bindings/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PHPWebdriver</a> (which uses JsonWireProtocol) to access:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$webdriver = new WebDriver("localhost", "4444");
  
  $webdriver-&gt;connect("firefox");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried doing it from the PHP side:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$webdriver-&gt;connect("firefox","",array('profile'=&gt;'default') );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>or:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$webdriver-&gt;connect("firefox","",array('profile'=&gt;'Profile0') );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>with no success (firefox starts, but not using my profile).</p>
  
  <p>I also tried the hacker's approach of creating a batch file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/bin/bash
  /usr/bin/firefox -P default
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And then starting Selenium with:
      java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="/usr/local/src/selenium/myfirefox" </p>
  
  <p>Firefox starts, but not using by default profile and, worse, everything hangs: selenium does not seem able to communicate with firefox when started this way.</p>
  
  <p>P.S. I saw <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650506/selenium-custom-firefox-profile">Selenium - Custom Firefox profile</a>  I tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate "not-there"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And it refuses to run! Excited, thinking I might be on to something, I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/0abczyxw.default/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This does nothing. I.e. it still starts with a new profile :-(</p>