Open tor browser with selenium

Question

Is it possible to make selenium use the TOR browser? Does anyone have any code they could copy-paste?

Answer 1

I looked into this, and unless I'm mistaken, on face value it's not possible.

The reason this cannot be done is because:

• Tor Browser is based on the Firefox code.
• Tor Browser has specific patches to the Firefox code to prevent external applications communicating with the Tor Browser (including blocking the Components.Interfaces library).
• The Selenium Firefox WebDriver communicates with the browser through Javascript libraries that are, as aforementioned, blocked by Tor Browser.

This is presumably so no-one outside of the Tor Browser either on your box or over the internet knows about your browsing.

Your alternatives are:

• Use a Tor proxy through Firefox instead of the Tor Browser (see the link in the comments of the question).
• Rebuild the Firefox source code with the Tor Browser patches excluding those that prevent external communication with Tor Browser.

I suggest the former.