Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in many programming languages against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium RC is a powerful and simple framework for running (scheduled or manually) automated UI centric regression tests for web applications / services. Here are few simple tips for Selenium RC java client. I used JUnit for tests. You can use NGUnit too.

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The online US non-immigrant visa application site - https://www.vfs-usa.co.in/ doesn’t allow you to submit the visa application using the popular Firefox browser.

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Microsoft was the sole leading browser (all versions combined) in 2002-2003 with over 85% of market share. The earlier leader Netscape had by then sunk into oblivion. Flash forward 2007 and we can see Microsoft Internet Explorer barely holding on to over 50% market share with its fortunes steadily declining. It is still at 57% (all versions combined) as of October 2007.

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Cross-browser and cross-platform testing is a bane as well as a requirement for web applications. Consider Internet Explorer on Windows. There are two major version 6 & 7, not to mention still used 5.5. You need to either use different machines or multi-boot machines or use hacks to run them simultaneously or virtualization software like VMWare; not of them are really easy to setup and use for common web developer. Then you have Opera & Firefox (we develop in Firefox so it gets tested first in our case). Did I mention testing on Mac with Safari, Firefox and other browsers? Oh, and don’t forget Linux too. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Let’s see how you can solve most of these problems.

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By default in Firefox you can type one or more keywords in the location bar. Firefox recognizes that it is not an URL and uses I’m Lucky search with Google search engine for version < 2; it uses Google search by name for Firefox version 2 and above. Here is how you can change it.

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AdBlock Plus is a controversial Firefox plugin to prevent ads from displaying on web pages. There is a simple procedure to detect (and take appropriate action) AdBlock Plus.

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In Linux, unlike Windows, multiple users can simultaneously connect to the same machine and get a full GUI using windows managers like VNC. However when one of the account has Firefox opened, others are prevented from bringing up firefox which can be very much irritating. The solution is to bring up firefox with the following command:
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The WordPress plugin contest results were just announced by Mark Ghosh. We sponsored a copy of Translator Pro 5.0 plugin for the competition. The winners are:

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In ExtJS you can create ComboBox which loads data from the server. You can also code so that new data is loaded from the server in response to an event like changing selection of another ComboBox. However it also means that the filtering is done remotely which is slow.

In ExtJS ComboBox automatic filtering is a nifty capability where the ComboBox items are automatically filtered to show only the values which matches the text you typed so far. It can also auto-fill the rest for you. This powerful capability comes at a price for remote mode. Every time the data is filtered by sending a query to the server which can be slower than local query.

In many use cases the full data is already on the client side, fetched during the initial loading of the ComboBox. Subsequent filtering can be easily done on the client side. Let’s see how we can solve it.

Update: I have also filed a defect in ExtJS forum to hopefully incorporate the functionality in the core with suggested solutions. The defect details has been provided at the end of this post.
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Simple things should be simple. While starting with ExtJS, I saw a screencast on Grid which used a rather dubious method of making an AJAX call using an actual form element. I hunted for a better option and I came across a better option - Ext.data.Connection. Here’s an working example on how you can easily make AJAX call in ExtJS library.

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