

Marionette - The Future of FirefoxDriver in Selenium - AutomatedTester
http://www.theautomatedtester.co.uk/blog/2012/marionette-the-future-of-firefoxdriver-in-selenium.html

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bratsche
Did anyone else see "marionette" and think this was related to the Backbone.js
Marionette library?

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shiven
Wait, what? Is this analogous to the ActiveX crap from MS, with the only
difference being that ActiveX allowed plundering the OS and this allows the
same for the browser/WebOS? Could someone more knowledgeable articulate the
contents of this article in plain- _er_ language.

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cleverjake
No, it isn't.

Selenium [<http://seleniumhq.org/>] is a web testing automation tool that
allows developers to automate the redundant bits of front end testing. The W3C
wants to make this tool a standard so that more tools and test suites can
integrate it with the confidence that it isn't going to go anywhere. This is
not something that is for the average user or to power your website - this is
just something that gets thrown into the build/testing process to ensure your
app/site/plugin works as expected.

Now, rather than Selenium have browser specific code in the core executable,
it relies on drivers for every browser you want to use. Mozilla has announced
Marionette, which is a beefed up selenium driver that makes it easier to test
the browser itself, rather than the browsers contents (think of automatically
changing settings - turning off js, toggling plugins, etc).

This is in no way analogous to Active X because it is not meant for end users
- just developers.

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rst
There's still the potential for security problems, as the OP acknowledges: "It
still has to go through our security review since just having an open socket
can drive the browser is quite scary and an opportunistic hacker could just
run a selenium script and steal details. It will probably be preferenced off
to start but is still a potentially scary problem."

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cleverjake
Absolutely, I was just making the point that this was not /intended/ for
public use, unlike activex.

