Page 1 of 1

Open Browser fails to open Firefox Portable

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2015 8:17 am
by odklizec
Hi,

This is probably more FR than a bug report ;) From some internal reasons, I need to use Firefox Portable on my laptop. I just experienced a problem with Open Browser action, which fails to start it (using "Firefox" parameter). It fails with error "Failed to run application 'firefox'." I guess there is a missing Firefox entry in registry, used by Ranorex to launch the Firefox? However, there is number of entries pointing to the Portable version.

I'm aware that Ranorex officially supports Firefox, not Firefox Portable. But since the Portable version is more or less the same Firefox as regular one, it would be nice to have it working as well.

BTW, Ranorex plugin is correctly installed to the Portable version, so at least the instrumentation recognized it correctly as Firefox.

I'm using latest Ranorex 5.2.2.

Thank you in advance.

Re: Open Browser fails to open Firefox Portable

Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2015 3:02 pm
by krstcs
You should use the Run Application action, with it pointed at the FF instance. You can pass the URL as a parameter to the FF executable.


There is no need for Ranorex to change anything.

Re: Open Browser fails to open Firefox Portable

Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 8:38 am
by odklizec
Hi krstcs,

Thanks for your input and hint about the Run Application action. I completely forgot about it ;)

BTW, you are also right that there is nothing to fix on Ranorex side. I did a little investigation and it seems the problem is in FF Portable installation, which does not add required firefox.exe key to registry. Apparently, Ranorex is using this key to start FF. The key is expected to be here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\firefox.exe
with default string pointing to FF path and "Path" string pointing to FF app directory.
After adding this key and both strings manually, Ranorex Open Browser action works just fine. Maybe it helps someone else in future.
FF_regkey.png

Re: Open Browser fails to open Firefox Portable

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 9:26 am
by Support Team
Hello odklizec,

Thank you for sharing your experiences with Firefox portable.

Regards,
Robert