VSTS 2010 Known Issues with Firefox playback

Known Issues in Mozilla Firefox Playback

1. Editable Div’s : IE has the ability to render editable DIV’s where the user can click inside it & type some content. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t have the ability to render editable DIV’s. Instead it renders as a document inside an IFRAME. When the user records actions on an editable DIV in IE, it fails to playback in Mozilla Firefox as the DIV Tag is not rendered in Mozilla Firefox leading to UITestControlNotFoundException.
2. DOM Hierarchy Mismatch: Any Web control is identified by a set of intermediate elements in the hierarchy of the DOM tree. These set of intermediate elements form the query id of the control which was discussed in the Recorder section. The Query Id of a control is a string indicating the hierarchy of controls. The Playback uses the query id to find the entire intermediate elements one after other before finding the desired element.
3. There are instances when the DOM tree’s rendered by the browsers is different. The DOM hierarchy of a control acted upon could be different in IE & Mozilla Firefox. In these cases the playback couldn’t succeed in finding the control in Mozilla Firefox from the information which was recorded in IE.For ex: IE introduces additional FORM or TABLE tags in the hierarchy of the controls which might not be present in case of Mozilla Firefox. In case these tags get captured as intermediate elements during recording; the playback would fail in Mozilla Firefox as the same control wouldn’t have FORM or TABLE tag in its hierarchy.This is not a very common though, but in case you feel if the control you acted upon in present in Mozilla Firefox, but the playback reports that the control cannot be found in Mozilla Firefox, you can compare the DOM hierarchy of the control by viewing the DOM tree’s in IE Developer Toolbar & Firebug.
4. Playback Action Failure: Some of the controls can be found in Mozilla Firefox, but are not actionable. Whenever the playback has to perform a primitive operation like a click on a control, it has to find the bounding rectangle (location) of the control. For some controls, Mozilla Firefox might return an empty bounding rectangle; thereby even though the search for the control succeeds we cannot perform action on the control. Playback fails with HiddenControlException in these cases.
5. This is a rare occurrence which was noticed across a few websites. One way to identify this issue is to view the control through firebug. On clicking on a control/Tag in DOM tree, we can see the highlighter which shows the bounding rectangle for the control. If we do not see a bounding rectangle or highlighter for the control, the control is not actionable & the playback would fail with hidden control exception.
6. Browser Rendering: Many websites take the type of browser into account and send different pages for different types of browsers. In doing so, some websites also modify the properties of the controls being sent. This could result in search failure for controls when we playback in Mozilla Firefox. Using extensions like firebug, IE developer controls we can make sure that the properties of control searched for is consistent across IE & Mozilla Firefox.
7. Different browser behaviour due to use of Non Standard HTML : Both the browsers IE & Mozilla Firefox support nonstandard HTML to an extent. But some of controls/eventing implemented in a nonstandard way would not work in both the browsers. Due to this reason the action performed on some controls in IE while recording may not work during playback in Mozilla Firefox. This has nothing to do with the Playback but the browser doesn’t support these actions even when it is performed manually. In case of playback failure, make sure that the sequence of actions recorded can be manually performed in Mozilla Firefox.
8. NavigateToURL aggregator does not support opening the Mozilla Firefox browser with a particular profile. It always open the browser with default profile.