When you run a testcase using Selenium WebDriver against a site like SharePoint, you’ll frequently see that Firefox is blocked waiting for you to enter the username and password of a user. This may seem unexpected because it even happens when your own Firefox window doesn’t need you to enter any credentials.

The reason for this is because the FirefoxDriver creates a new temporary profile and it doesn’t include the settings needed for SSO. There’s 2 ways of dealing with this.

The first way

The first way only works on the local machine that is running the tests. You can configure the FirefoxDriver to use an existing profile instead of creating a new one. The following code snippet shows how to do that in C#.

new FirefoxDriver(new FirefoxProfileManager().GetProfile("default"));

You don’t have to use the “default” profile. You’re free to create a dedicated profile for Selenium tests if you want. Just start Firefox from the command line using firefox -p to start Firefox’s Profile Manager.

The second way

The first way wont work if your tests use RemoteWebDriver to connect to a remote instance of FirefoxDriver. This is due to the fact that identically named profiles, still have a different internal name on each machine.

Instead we will configure Firefox to include the relevant SSO settings into every profile that’s created. You will need administrative credentials during this one-time configuration. Lets assume your site is called “https://myserver.contoso.local/sites/myapp”

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the Firefox installation directory. That’s usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox”
2. Create a file there (in this example, I used “mozilla.cfg”) with the following content:

   //
   lockPref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "contoso.local");
   

3. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to Firefox’s directory containing the preferences to be used for new profiles. That’s usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\pref”
4. Create a file there called “local-settings.js” with the following content:

   //@line 2 "c:\builds\moz2_slave\rel-m-esr31-w32_bld-0000000000\build\browser\app\profile\channel-prefs.js"
   /* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
   * License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
   * file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */
   pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);
   pref("general.config.filename", "mozilla.cfg");
   

See Locking preferences in Firefox for details on this.