Friday, 29 July 2011

Problems running Firefox 5 from watir-webdriver on Mac OS 10.5

Finally decided it was time to update my watir-webdriver development environment to the latest version of Firefox. I have been happily using Firefox 3.6.19 on my 64bit Intel Mac 10.5 and yesterday made the jump to Firefox 5.

To my horror there is a bug in Firefox 4 and 5 which causes problems when attempting to start Firefox from the command line (basically what watir-webdriver does).

Thankfully with the help of Jarib Bakken I was able to use the workaround detailed on this blog post.

The work around is to strip the x86_64 part from firefox-bin using ditto:

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
mv firefox-bin firefox-bin.original
ditto --arch i386 firefox-bin.original firefox-bin 

This will solve the problem until we can upgrade to a later version of Mac Os.

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

0 comments: