Selenium Ice: A "Cool" New Browser Extension for Internet Explorer
July 1st, 2008 | Published in Google Open Source
I'm happy to announce "Selenium Ice", a new tool for developers who test web applications in Internet Explorer with Selenium. This first version of Ice is limited in scope — it simply adds a new namespace ("window.ice") to every web page, for which developers can write code in C# that is callable from JavaScript. In the future, Ice will be used by the Selenium project team as a building block for providing more native control over the IE browser process. With this native access, Selenium will be able to more reliably catch and close unexpected dialog windows, provide better information when JavaScript errors occur, or do things that require interaction with the operating system, like handling file uploads and downloads. Ice can also serve as a base for linking in faster XPath support in IE — an oft-requested feature among Selenium users.
The Ice project was developed using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, so no development licensing fees are required beyond access to a machine running Windows. There's an NAnt script for continuous integration, a WiX script for automated creation of a Microsoft Installer (.msi), and a system test script written in Python that can launch IE and ensure that the extension works correctly.
The code is all Open Source and available under the Apache 2.0 license. You can check out our project site on Google Code and may want to join our Selenium Ice discussion group. We always love to hear from you, so let us know what you think of our cool new code!