The Gecko Driver Selenium stands for web browser engine which is inbuilt within the Mozilla firefox browser. This present driver acts like a proxy between web driver enabled clients and Mozilla firefox browser. Gecko driver has a link between selenium web driver tests and also Mozilla firefox browser.
Mozilla Firefox is the default selenium browser before selenium 3. After selenium 3, testers will need to initialise the script to use Firefox using Gecko driver explicitly. Selenium may use W3C web driver protocol. It gives requests to Gecko Driver. Gecko Driver will convert them into the protocol named Marionette. Firefox will knows the commands transmitted in the form of Marionette protocol executes them.
Advantages of Gecko Driver
Selenium Webdriver version 2.53 that will be compatible with Mozilla firefox version 47.0+. The firefox driver can be used versions of Mozilla firefox and can be discontinued The main advantage of this driver is opposed to the Mozilla firefox driver is compatibility. GeckoDriver uses W3C WebDriver protocol to communicate with Selenium. Here W3C is defined as good web driver. Meaning selenium developers will not create a new version of Web Driver for every browser version.
How to download and install Gecko Driver Selenium web driver?
Gecko Driver is available in an executable file that will be downloaded on the system. There are following steps to download the gecko driver.
Step 1. https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases, here we can select main version for Gecko Driver which will be on the operating system.
Step 2. Once the Zip file is downloaded, extract the contents of the Zip File onto the file folder.
Step 3. We have to point out the location where extracted the driver. Location will be used later to activate the driver.
Different ways to initialise Gecko Driver:
There are three different ways initialize Gecko Driver:
1.Using Desired Capabilities- First set the system property of Gecko Driver.
The syntax
System.setProperty(“webdriver.gecko.driver”,”Path to geckdriver.exe file”);
The example:
System.setProperty (“webdriver.gecko.driver”,”D:\\Downloads\\GeckoDriver.exe”);
Here the required capabilities help Selenium to understand the browser name version and operating system to execute all the automated tests.
2.Using marionette property
Gecko driver will be initialized using marionette property like
System.setProperty (“webdriver.gecko.driver”,”D:\\Downloads\\GeckoDriver.exe”);
If Gecko driver once initialized by using above method code for desired method will not be required.
3.Using Firefox
Here Mozilla firefox 47+ has marionette driver as legacy system. It has an usage, marionette driver will be called using Firefox options.
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
options.setLegacy(true);
Why we need Gecko driver?
For web browser like Mozilla Firefox till 47 we do not need any Gecko driver but for Mozilla firefox after version will come with marionette that is an automation driver for Mozilla. It will remotely control UI or the internal javascript of Gecko platform like firefox if we do not use gecko driver we cannot instantiate object of Geckodriver and launch firefox.
How gecko driver works?
The web driver will connect with the firefox using the gecko driver exactly like other drivers,a local server is started by this executable that will run your selenium tests. It works on the proxy between the local remote end.
The client or the local system may have a appeal which is the webDriver call to the Gecko driver. The Gecko driver may transform that kind of requests into the Marionette protocol and also transfers to the marionette driver. The server will send back the response to the client through the Gecko driver. As this execution happens inside the browser. We can know that the working of firefox driver. With Gecko driver we can be able to execute selenium scripts and be able to launch the firefox browser. We can freely execute our scripts in headless mode that optimize the speed execution.
Questions
1. What is Gecko driver?
2. How Gecko driver works explain?
