[🐛 Bug]: Selenium Manager downloads x86_64 firefox binaries on ARM Linux

[lprimak]

What happened?

Firefox is available for Linux ARM (mac, OCI/ampere, ARM/gravitron etc)
However, Selenium Manager downloads the x86_64 version leading to failures

High Impact

This issue makes impossible to run Selenium tests on Ubuntu-based docker images without going through gymnastics of installing firefox manually.
This is difficult because it requires snap, which doesn't work in Docker containers

How can we reproduce the issue?

Any Selenium run on arm64 linux with firefox driver will reproduce this.

Relevant log output

N/A

Operating System

ARM Linux (Mac, cloud)

Selenium version

Java 4.19.1 (ltest)

What are the browser(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

Firefox (latest)

What are the browser driver(s) and version(s) where you see this issue?

geckodriver (latest)

Are you using Selenium Grid?

N/A

[github-actions]

@lprimak, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[lprimak]

Did a bit more research, and I don't see a "download" for Arm64 Linux on Firefox' site at all. Perhaps they don't offer supported versions.
Still, I think Selenium should give an error / log or something instead of silently downloading x86 version.

Alpine linux offers firefox in their apk package manager, but ubuntu, debian, etc. do not.

[github-actions]

We need more information about this issue in order to troubleshoot.

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[diemol]

@bonigarcia do you know if SM checks this?

[bonigarcia]

Indeed, Firefox is not distributed for ARM Linux. On the other hand, Selenium Manager for Linux is only compiled and distributed for x64. Maybe Selenium Manager should fail in this scenario, but I never tested it.

[diemol]

True. ARM Linux is still "rare," so we do not have the tools to test it yet. I will leave this open and see if someone wants to help add this validation. Right now, this is a low priority.

[github-actions]

This issue is looking for contributors.

Please comment below or reach out to us through our IRC/Slack/Matrix channels if you are interested.

[lprimak]

I did some more research, and Mozilla is working on new distributions for Arm Linux.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678342

I didn't realize that Selenium Manager is only compiled for x64, I guess it was running in the emulation mode in my tests.

[mvysny]

Playwright supports both Chromium and Firefox for Linux arm64.

[diemol]

Playwright supports both Chromium and Firefox for Linux arm64.

@mvysny Playwright patches Firefox, so you are not using the real browser your users have.

[atmnk]

Indeed, Firefox is not distributed for ARM Linux. On the other hand, Selenium Manager for Linux is only compiled and distributed for x64. Maybe Selenium Manager should fail in this scenario, but I never tested it.

I see its available with focal package here https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/arm64/firefox/download. Or I am mistaking anything. Is this still issue? Will be happy to contribute.

[diemol]

What's the Mozilla url to download Firefox for Linux on ARM architecture? We don't grab packages from Ubuntu, we grab the binary directly from Mozilla.

[atmnk]

I think they are not yet publishing for release versions they recently started publishing nightly as i can see here https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/arm64-armhf-firefox-binary-tarballs-for-packaging-for-ubuntu/m-p/12847.
May be we should wait for them to publish.

[titusfortner]

my vote is that until we can support it, we should throw an error rather than get the wrong thing