Is Selenium Automation Testing with Disabled JavaScript Settings Worth Your Time?

Things That Can Be Done With JavaScript & Things That Can’t Be!

• Access and modify all the content visible on the web page such as text, images, videos or any other kind of private data.
• Access the cookies sent by the web server.
• Make request to other servers for data capturing.

• Accessing files stored in your local system other than those uploaded on a web page.
• Accessing data from other web pages open in other tabs or on different browsers.
• Accessing and controlling the hardware capabilities of your system.
• Accessing any kind of stuff related to extensions and plugins which have been installed.

Why Would A User Visit Your Website With JavaScript Disabled?

Why Testing With JavaScript Disabled Should Be A Part Of Your QA Checklist?

• Browser JavaScript Interpreter is not able to parse and execute JavaScript code.
• New JavaScript features such as ECMAScript6 / ECMAScript Next and modern Web API fails to work in older browser versions.

How To Disable JavaScript For Manual Testing

• Launch a webpage for which you need to disable JavaScript.
• Right click on a page and direct to Inspect Elements.
• Once you get the developer tools open, then press CTRL+SHIFT+P.
• Type “Disable JavaScript” and click on the first option that says debugger.
2. Mozilla Firefox
Similarly to Google Chrome, Here is how Google search represents itself by default with enabled JavaScript.
Follow the below steps to disabling JavaScript for website on Mozilla Firefox:
• Launch a browser and enter “about:config” in URL address bar
• Click on “I accept the risk!” to see the configurations
• Enter “javascript.enabled” in search field
• Double click on “javascript.enabled” available entry to set boolean value as false
Note: You can use this website for confirming if your JavaScript is enabled or disabled.

How To Disable JavaScript For Automation Testing with Selenium

Now, we get down to automation testing with Selenium. Below is the code that helps to disable JavaScript on Chrome and Firefox browser. We have used ChromeOptions and FirefoxOptions class to handle the preferences of the browser. These classes further help in setting ChromeDriver and FireFoxDriver specific capabilities such as browser version, disabling extension, start maximized, start headless and making browser default.

Code To Run Automation Testing with Selenium In Mozilla Firefox

package DemoAutomation;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxOptions;

public class JSdisableFirefox {
    
    //Disabling JS in Firefox
    @Test()
    public void Firefox_javascript_disable() throws InterruptedException {

        System.setProperty("webdriver.firefox.driver", "C:\\geckodriver.exe");
        
        FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
        options.addPreference("javascript.enabled", false);
         
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);
        
        driver.get("https://www.google.com/imghp");
        driver.findElement(By.name("q")).sendKeys("flowers");
        driver.findElement(By.className("Tg7LZd")).click();
        
        Thread.sleep(5000);
        driver.quit();

    }
}

Code To Run Automation Testing with Selenium In Google Chrome

package DemoAutomation;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

public class JSdisableChrome {

           //Disabling JS in Chrome
          @Test()
    public void Chrome_javascript_disable() throws InterruptedException {
        
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\Lenovo-I7\\Desktop\\Selenium\\chromedriver.exe");
        
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
        Map<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        prefs.put("profile.managed_default_content_settings.javascript", 2);
        options.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);
        
        
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
        
        driver.get("https://www.google.com/imghp");
        driver.findElement(By.name("q")).sendKeys("flowers");
        driver.findElement(By.className("Tg7LZd")).click();
        Thread.sleep(5000);
        
        
        driver.quit();  
        
        
    }
    
    

}

Conclusion

JavaScript has been an integral part of web development, and it definitely helps to provide us with an eye-appealing website. However, it is important that we test what we build. In my opinion, the results were a bit devastating from UX point of view. Few websites that I tested turn out to be completely blank. Reason being, the website was entirely dependent on JavaScript rendering. Even if the website is partially dependent on JavaScript, it is the responsibility of the tester to test their product with and without JavaScript according to the user perspective. Not to forget browser compatibility testing with JavaScript disabled will help you ensure a robust website for a wider set of audience. If you are using a cloud-based cross browser testing tool such as LambdaTest, then you get to test on 2000+ real browsers hosted by VM on cloud. So you don’t get to worry about maintaining your own browser library, as we do it for you. Happy testing! 🙂