Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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· shanly

"I follow [link]" Behat/Mink step not working but not throwing an exception in Internet Explorer with Selenium Server

Credit for this tip goes to Jim Evans

I was trying to run my suite of Behat/Mink tests using a Selenium2 grid. The IE9/Vista machine would report that my "I follow..." steps succeeded but the browser wouldn't load the link referenced in the step argument. Other browsers on the Windows Vista node (FF, Chrome) executed the tests correctly.

After discussion with Jim Evans on the Selenium IRC he suggested that I ensure that:

  1. protected mode was set consistently in all four domains in security settings and
  2. the page zoom was set to 100%.

This fixed the problem.

Further background: It's impossible to reliably detect if the click event that is generated by a IE Driver succeeds. All IE Driver can do is report the click was entered into the input queue. For this reason, the "I follow" reports success, even if the click eventually fails.

This, combined with Mink either ignoring the exception thrown when the browser zoom is not 100%, or using incorrectly using the ignoreZoomSetting capability of IE Driver leads to the strange behaviour.