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mozilla
geckodriver
Web Development2016–2023
mozilla / geckodriver

geckodriver

WebDriver Classic proxy for automating Firefox through Marionette

Web DevelopmentNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

WebDriver Classic proxy for automating Firefox through Marionette

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-07-12 17:37:20 UTC to 2023-12-13 01:28:06 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
masklinn·Jun 22, 2017
1. You can use the WebDriver protocol[0] without selenium 2. Firefox's WebDriver endpoint geckodriver[1] is a layer above Firefox/Gecko's native Marionette protocol[2] So you doubly don't need to use selenium, you can write your own WebDriver client (which should be cross-browser assuming the browsers either support WebDriver natively or have a WD layer of some sort installed) or you can use raw Marionette (either a hand-rolled client or an existing client) [0] https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html#protocol [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Marionet...
In Firefox 56 supports headless mode on Windows
jgraham·Jul 12, 2016
Not in the same league as the mp4 parser shipping to all Firefox users, but GeckoDriver [1], a Mozilla-authored standalone binary for interacting with Firefox via the WebDriver protocol (e.g. using Selenium) is also written in Rust and shipping, possibly to as many as hundreds of users ;) Overall the experience of using Rust for that project has been pretty great; the original requirements for a language were "able to produce static executables with no external runtime requirement, not prone to C-style memory safety issues, and accessible to a team with mostly Python backgrounds". That leaves quite a few options — Go for example — but being a Mozilla project taking the opportunity to use Rust seemed like it would align better with initiatives like those discussed in the article. Apart from the general niceness of Rust-the-langauge, the ex
Read the rest
perience of the Rust ecosystem has been really nice. Not only were there easy-to-install, well documented, packages to do much of the heavy lifting (http server, command line argument handling, etc.), it was also quite straightforward to set up travis builds using cargo to compile releases for linux64+musl osx and cross-compile releases for linux-arm7hf (added because someone asked about running on raspberry pi and it turned out to be trivial) and win64. The only wrinkle so far has been the difficulty of cross compiling to win32, meaning we might actually need to set up Appveyor or similar. Obviously this is a much smaller project than the original post in terms of the number of users, and rather different as it is much higher level and could comfortably be written in Python or similar, except for the distribution requirements. However I think the use of Rust has been an unmitigated success, and I would be tempted to use it for a lot more projects that I would never consider writing in C/C++. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver
In Shipping Rust code in Firefox

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