Switching windows by name or handle?

[aik099]

Technical limitations

• Selenium 2 can switch windows either by name or by handle (see https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/legacy/json_wire_protocol/#sessionsessionidwindow)
• Selenium 3 can switch windows by handle only (see https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver2/#switch-to-window)

Switching windows by a handle

• the Selenium server provides a handle for the currently focused window
• the Selenium server provides a handle for all opened windows without the need to focus each of them upfront
• using a handle is supported for Selenium 2 and Selenium 3
• providing an empty window name will switch to the first opened window in Selenium 2 only

Switching windows by a name

• the Selenium server can only return the name for the currently focused window
• there can be several windows with an empty (non-unique) name
• no way to switch to the first opened window

Current implementation

• the getWindowName method returns a handle
• the getWindowNames method returns a handles array
• the switchToWindow on Selenium 2 can switch windows by name/handle (see Technical limitations above)
• the switchToWindow on Selenium 3 can switch windows by a handle (see Technical limitations above)

Proposed implementation

See https://github.com/minkphp/MinkSelenium2Driver/pull/384 .

• the getWindowName method returns a window name (if non-empty) or a handle
• the getWindowNames method returns a window name (if non-empty) or a handle array
• the switchToWindow can switch windows by a name/handle, but needs to iterate/focus over each window to determine the handle by its name

The downside of the proposed implementation

All windows need to be iterated to retrieve their name, which:

• can be slow when lots of windows are opened (these websites exist?);
• when the website has a JavaScript code that closes a window upon focus loss, then iteration can be very bad.

In the https://github.com/minkphp/MinkSelenium2Driver/pull/384/files#r1501886088 @uuf6429 proposed to replace window name support with window handle support Mink-wise. Considering, that Selenium-based drivers are the only ones that support window operations now. But who knows what will be in the future.

I personally like the proposed implementation, because:

• it makes tests pass for Selenium 3;
• the potential problems, described above, are really an edge cases, that might be as common.