Hunting the Shmoo

At the beginning of September, I was asked to write yet another automated test harness for testing user responsiveness. Among other things, the harness needed to be capable of automating a wide range of user interactions in Firefox (such as opening context menus, clicking buttons etc). Oh and by the way this needs to be finished as quickly as possible.

Firefox is known for its extensibility. In fact, over 2.4 billion addons have been downloaded to date, meaning there are a lot of people using a lot of addons. While having 20+ addons can undoubtedly personalize your browsing experience, it can also be a pain in the ass to manually install them every time you set up a new Firefox profile. As a developer working on Firefox related automation tools, this is twice as true since I create a separate profile for each and every project I work on, installing a constant set of addons on each one.