List Methods of Selenium.WebDriver.DriverExtensions.HasPermissions package of Selenium Framework

You are missing initializing of your wanted web driver. However you didn't post your current version of selenium, so I assumed it was last version.
Here is what documentation says about Selenium::WebDriver.

.for(browser) ⇒ Driver
.for(browser, opts) ⇒ Driver

Create a new Driver instance with the correct bridge for the given browser One special argument is not passed on to the bridges, :listener. You can pass a listener for this option to get notified of WebDriver events. The passed object must respond to #call or implement the methods from AbstractEventListener.

So in your case you need to change you driver variable

driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:firefox)
# ...

WebDriver docs

In case anyone searching finds this, it turned out that I had incorrectly set the proxy in the Internet Explorer Webdriver instantiation. A simple mistake leading to a lot of confusion.

I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Assuming your Web Application is accessible via HTTP, you should be fine (this is obviously VERY likely to be true).

All RSpec Request Specs are basically black box tests. That's the point of Request Specs - you want to simulate a real user and exercise your whole Application stack - starting with HTML views down to database access. The same is true for cucumber features.

Writing you Specs might be a little less comfortable, because you can't rely on the Web Application to adhere to Rails conventions.

Anyway... I hope this helps.

Looks like you have some ajax calls going on there, preventing the element to be clicked. Whilst adding waits will solve your problem initially, consider adding a wait_for_ajax method into your click method.

For example:

def wait_for_ajax(timeout = 30)
  wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new timeout: timeout
  wait.until { @driver.execute_script("return jQuery.active == 0") == true }
end

The benefit of this is that you're not hardcoding in waits which is just bad.

The correct pluralization is "addresses".

You can find just about all the tags by looking at the ruby doc for Container.

I don't know Ruby, but in Java, you could just do the following :

boolean isLabelPresent = true;
try {
    driver.findElement(By.xpath("//label[@for='session_remember_me']"));
} catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
    isLabelPresent = false;
}

Waiting for the page elements to finish loading is a classic Selenium issue with no single best solution. Working with Turbolinks simply compounds this problem.

When I need to know that Turbolinks has finished, listening for the Turbolinks turbolinks:load event (formerly page:load) is the best way I can think of.

If we know the exact line(s) of code that trigger the page load, we can pass this code as a block to a wrapper method that handles all of the wait logic for us, as follows:

def wait_for_page_load(driver)
  # listen for Turbolinks to start and stop
  driver.execute_script('document.addEventListener("turbolinks:before-visit", function() { window.turbolinks_is_busy = true; });')
  driver.execute_script('document.addEventListener("turbolinks:load", function() { window.turbolinks_is_busy = false; });')

  # execute the code that causes the page load
  yield

  # optional short sleep, just to be safe
  sleep(1)

  # wait for the various 'page is loading' indicators, including our custom Turbolinks indicator
  wait = Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(:timeout => 60)
  wait.until { driver.execute_script("return document.readyState == 'complete' && jQuery.active == 0 && !window.turbolinks_is_busy;") }
end

Example usage:

wait_for_page_load(@driver) { @driver.find_element(id: 'a#logout').click }

References:

• https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#observing-navigation-events
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/readyState
• jQuery.active function

Inside the loop you need to use

user.a(:class => '_pg23k _9irns _gvoze').click(:control)

The reason is that a browser object can be used to search elements inside the main html page. If you use 'browser' inside the loop it will be looking at the entire HTML, and where more than one element that meets the search criteria exists, it will return the first one found. So even through it is inside the loop, it would find the same element on the page every time.

To use the current item in the list that is being iterated you need to use the name (in this case user) that you've told it to assign to the list elements as it walks the list.

:remote means that you're going to use a remote server running Selenium Server at the :url. In this case selenium server's running on localhost. Because no browser is identified, it will use whatever default browser the server is set to.

:firefox means it's going to try to use firefox on the same box the script is running on.

You can see these two examples on the intro page to rubybindings. http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/RubyBindings

For more general documentation stuff this might be a good place...

As to why someone would this is? Maybe in a prod environment someone else aside from the guy who developed this code controls the selenium server depending on the platform it's on (chrome, ie, ff, etc) (like some prod guy who can't access code?). I'm just guessing here.