Firefox address bar and page are blank when running RSpec test

Question

I am getting this error

   Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError:
   unable to obtain stable firefox connection in 60 seconds (127.0.0.1:7055)

Here is the list of my tests gems

capybara (2.1.0)
rspec (2.14.1)
rspec-core (2.14.3)
rspec-expectations (2.14.0)
rspec-mocks (2.14.1)
rspec-rails (2.14.0)
selenium-webdriver (2.35.1)

My Firefox version is 29

When I downgraded my FF, it works fine.

Answer 1

I had the same issue and this works for me with Firefox version 28

In your Gemfile, replace the current version with

gem "selenium-webdriver", "~> 2.38.0"

Then run,

gem update selenium-webdriver

bundle install

Answer 2

Firefox 29 is not a stable release, it is still in beta - you cannot, under any circumstances, expect the team to support beta browser versions.

The answer lies within "When I downgrade my FF it works fine".

Selenium bundles the driver required for Firefox, it's actually a Firefox extension and requires maintenance & fixes to be kept up to date & stable with Firefox as it upgrades and steams through versions.

The solution is usually two-fold. The first one is remember that Selenium will only support certain versions of Firefox. When a new version of Firefox is released, there may be some compataibility issues, but usually, the team can get out a release quite quickly so you shouldn't be stuck for too long. This doesn't apply at all here, because you are using a beta version of a browser, something that any reasonable developer isn't going to do.

The Selenium team aim to support the latest version of Firefox, the previous version to that, the latest ESR (Extended Support) release and the previous version to that.

The second part of your solution is to keep Selenium updated all the time. Your version is months old regardless of your Firefox version & Selenium's support schedule.

You can see from the latest change log that the support currently stands at:

17 (immediately previous ESR release)
24 (current ESR release)
27 (immediately previous release
28 (current release)

You are rolling back to a previous version, one that Selenium actually supports, that's why your problem is being fixed.