We started our web test automation efforts using Selenium RC to drive the Internet Explorer browser. Unsurprisingly, we eventually threw our hands up in the air over the insane instability of IE7 and got it to work quite well against Firefox (IE8 didn’t seem to be much better, but Selenium might not have caught up to it yet). Along the way, we had something in our StoryTeller test driver that killed off any open IE windows before every single test to avoid IE hangups killing off the build. Josh just suddenly pinged me about whether or not we could get rid of the “killIExplore” method. I said that I would rather not because we really should try to get the IE automation going again someday. It came down to the fact that Josh likes to run Pandora in IE because it’s the only thing he uses IE for and it’s easy to find Pandora on his taskbar. When he was running a StoryTeller test it did it’s little “kill all IE windows” trick and shut down Pandora in the middle of a good song. So there you go, we ended up changing our test automation architecture just to make Pandora work better for one person. Priorities.
Moral of the story? I’d really appreciate it if our customers just wouldn’t use Internet Explorer.
