Watir: Firefox Opens & Closes Browser
Watir is an library written in Ruby which can be used for the automated of web site testing. It is used by some sizable software development companies and is is easy to use. Installation on the 64bit Ubuntu machine does pose a bit of challenge given that JSSH (the java script shell used by Watir to automate the tests) is not compatible unless you decided to compile firefox from source enabling JSSH see here.
My problem was one which after hours (up to 3am) of searching I just could not find (even tried compiling FireFox from source) just could not find when executing the following:
require 'rubygems'
require 'watir'
Watir::Browser.default = "firefox"
browser = Watir::Browser.new
url_link = "my_linke"
browser.goto(url_link)
Firefox would open then close immediately leaving the watir script hanging script, attempting to then telnet to the Firefox port 9997 on localhost I received a connection refused. Was quite baffled since I followed the installation instructions to the letter, looking a bit futhur turns out other implementation of JSSH for Firefox 3.5.3 here (one which is not the Waitr installation page). Upon installation was able to telnet and the problem was resolved.