WebDriver Release
Just a quick blog post: there's a new WebDriver release out. The files are on the Google Code site. Features include:
- New IE driver (based on JNA rather than JNI)
- First release of the remote webdriver (though I should really build a WAR of the server-side :)
- Improved handling of profiles in Firefox
- Numerous bug fixes
Woot! The next release should be a clean up release, rolling through our open issues and closing as many as we can.
Posted in: /tech/webdriver
Hi, Mr. Simon Stewart,
My name is Wangshu Pang; I am a research assistant in an Information Retrieval laboratory in China. Recently I am doing a web crawling project, which aims at capturing AJAX generated data on webpages. I am very excited with your toolkit WebDriver, and I am using it to simulate a browser’s behavior so that asynchronous data can be crawled. I have some troubles in using the toolkit. I cannot find your contact information, so I can only comment here.
First of all, is it possible to run a browser completely in background? A crawler has high demand on performance. I wondered whether it is possible to operate an IE or Firefox browser background like HTMLUnit. HTMLUnit is also acceptable, but sometimes its behavior differs a lot from IE and Firefox.
Moreover, still a performance issue, I would like to know is it possible to modify the options of IE and Firefox through their drivers. I want the crawler working at the lowest load, e. g. black all images requests, all Flash requests, all advertisement requests, something like that.
I would appreciate it very much if you can help me with these issues. Thank you.
Wangshu Pang pangwangshu@gmail.com 2010-3-5