Selenium Issues

About 3:Selenium copies at startup the firefox profile to a temporary folder. If you don't specify a custom profile, Selenium propably uses the default profile which propably is bloated with addons you don't need for the test. Startup Firefox with '-p' and create a new profile for Selenium and copy it to a location you can point selenium to. This should speed up the test a bit.

Update:Firefox Profile location / Windows: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

My thoughts:

1. There are some cases that click isn't enough, but you certainly shouldn't be limited to buttons. You might want to experiment further with your locators.

2. Why do you need to set the id attribute of elements? I have experience with testing ExtJS applications, and the problem is usually locating elements that have dynamically set ids. In my opinion this is an issue with ExtJS and not Selenium. Using smart XPath techniques using contains, starts-with, and substring can make your locators much more reliable. CSS locators are also often helpful as you mentioned.

3. As amarsuperstar says, you don't need to start Firefox before every test. If you do, you might want to consider using the browserSessionReuse command to speed up launching the browser. Alternatively you can use Selenium Grid to run tests in parallel.

Finally, it's well worth looking into the WebDriver API that will be in the soon to be released alpha of Selenium 2. In my experience Firefox launch times are reduced, and commands such as click are much improved.

I am not sure about the first two points, but as for the third, I don't think you need to start the browser for every test. You can use the Seleium server (a jar in the selenium directory somewhere) then point your tests to that e.g. localhost:6554 and that will only open the browser once.

With that you can have the steps in your script to start server -> run all test -> terminate server and you will only have one browser session across your tests.