A client ran into a problem recently. After an upgrade of firefox, they suddenly had many selenium test failures. I was confused and couldn't figure it out for a *long* time.
When we'd connect to the running test (vnc), there were two tabs in the controlling firefox window. It turns out that the second tab was a "Thank you for upgrading firefox". That would have been innocuous if it just sat there in the background. Unfortunately, selenium took it over and then started to run the test in *both* tabs.
Since some tests changed session state (e.g., login, do some logged in work, logout) tests would fail when one tab would log the user in and the other tab would log the user out while the first tab wasn't finished yet.
Running firefox manually while forcing it to use the base profile used by selenium fixed the issue. We could also just have edited prefs.js and modified the lastAppVersion entry, but the first fix is easier (it does the lastAppVersion modification) and anyway I only learned about modifying lastAppVersion directly after I'd already done the first fix :-).
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