Hello, for some reason on one machine that I have the wptdriver setup on whenever I attempt to run a test on it, it opens the browser (firefox or chrome), navigating to the blank page and then it just sits there. No attempt is made to load the site. Eventually it times out and attempts to do the next site but again sits at the blank page.
I have installed this driver on other machines and it has run without a problem. Does anyone have any idea why this would be happening?
Are you running the 2.7 version of WebPagetest? There were changes needed in the extensions to support changes in Chrome and Firefox so if you are running an older version it could explain what you are seeing.
Currently running version 2.7.2, the extensions are the newest ones I believe. I tried setting up the drivers on another machine as well by copying the exact same folder from the non-working machine to the new one and it worked perfectly. It is only this individual machine it seems, I wish I could provide more information but I have been unable to reproduce the bug on any other system.
Any antivirus on the machine that may be interfering? Just a shot in the dark.
Disabled the antivirus and still ran into the issue, turns out the user was not actually running it as administrator, only using an account that had admin access and was claiming it to be run as administrator.
However with the most recent update to Firefox on Windows 7 the same blank page only issue is appearing once again. Using the same version of Firefox on an XP machine with the same driver is working, however the Windows 7 machine is having issues. Chrome on Windows 7 is not running into the blank page issue though. Are there additional changes to the extensions that have been released within the last month?
I updated the agents recently to deal with a Chrome change in Chrome 23 (Canary) but the Firefox plugin side of things hasn’t changed in quite a long time. You can try updating to the latest to see if it helps - https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/private-instances#TOC-Updating-Test-Agents
I just updated to the latest version of the extensions and I am still running into issues. Is it possible that the newest version of Firefox is blocking the extension from loading? Is there something like with chrome where you need to set a flag to allow that extension to be used?
No, I’m running Firefox 15 and Chrome 21 and 23 on the public instance and not seeing any issues with the extensions loading. What version of Firefox are you seeing issues with?
I am seeing it with the latest version of Firefox 15. Is there any way for me to produce debug logs that might give a little more insight into why this is happening on this machine and not others?
Best bet is probably for me to provide a debug build and instructions on how to capture the output. Things are kind of swamped right now but I’ll see if I can include it with a new 2.8 release in the next couple of days.
Is the VS2010 project included with the source set up to compile debug builds, if so then I can build my own as well, I would just need the instructions for how to capture the output. Thanks for the help!
I have solved the problem on one of the machines that was having an issue, the default Administrator account had been disabled, so I re-enabled it and logged in as Administrator. From there the drivers ran perfectly with Firefox, however they will still not run from another account when “run as Administrator” is used. However, there is another machine that will still not work with Firefox regardless of what account I am logged in as.
Yep, the source in SVN has the VS2010 project for the agents right at the top of the tree - http://webpagetest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ (webpagetest.sln) and the built binaries end up in /Debug and /Release
Nothing fancy to get teh output, you just need Debug View - DebugView - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs - all of the tracing is output as debug strings.
Here are two debug logs from the exact same machine, one while logged in as the default Administrator account in which Firefox works. And the other is when logged in as another user with admin privileges, this is the one where Firefox never gets past the blank page, I grabbed the debug data at this point rather than waiting the 240 seconds for it to close it.
From the look of the trace, the firefox extension didn’t get loaded by the browser. Not sure why though 
As a further update to this issue, on machines that are seeing problems loading the Firefox extension in the current version of Firefox, upon installing version 3.6 the driver operates fine.