I recently was attempting to diagnose an issue with the Safari Driver, the component of Safari which allows remote automation using the WebDriver protocol. In order to confirm whether my issue was a bug, I wanted to run the same test using a current Safari Technology Preview build and compare the results to Apple’s released Safari versions. I wasn’t able to find very clear examples or documentation about this, however, and wanted to be able to test it both with a local safaridriver as well as via Selenium.
There are at least a couple of ways to do this. First you’ll need to install the current Safari Technology Preview, via either:
brew cask install safari-technology-previewThe simplest way to test this is directly using the language binding of your choice, using executable_path. For example, using the Python selenium package (pip install selenium):
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Safari(executable_path='/Applications/Safari Technology Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/safaridriver')
The 3.8.0 release of Selenium server also supports setting this via safari.options in the desired capabilities. To test this locally, start up selenium 3.8.0 standalone:
java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.8.0.jar
13:40:25.829 INFO - Selenium build info: version: '3.8.0', revision: '924c4067df'
13:40:25.832 INFO - Launching a standalone Selenium Server
[..more output follows..]
Then connect to it, and set technologyPreview in the safari.options dictionary:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Remote(
command_executor='http://localhost:4444/wd/hub',
desired_capabilities={
'browserName': 'safari',
'safari.options': {'technologyPreview': True}
}
)
That’s it! You should see the purple Technology Preview app icon launch when launching the driver using these options. Thanks to Brian Burg for pointing me in the right direction in the #selenium IRC channel.