Re: The ever contentious capabilities for new sessions

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 7:39 AM, Simon Stewart <simon.m.stewart@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 10:14 PM, James Graham <james@hoppipolla.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> The other is that the proposed structure seems rather non-general. If I
>> want to specify something large like a bas64-encoded profile in a way that
>> it only appears in the message once, but where it applies to > 1 but not
>> all of the firstMatch parameter sets that isn't possible.
>>
>
> By design. Jason and I discussed this on the #selenium IRC channel. In the
> case of Firefox profiles, the common case I've seen is to ensure that a
> number of extensions are pre-installed, and those extensions support all
> requested versions of Firefox.
>

I would say that it would be fine to have a "non-general" structure here,
in favor of keeping the structure of the request simple. One can imagine a
configuration language that allows for arbitrary matching and merging
semantics (Googlers might know exactly which one I'm thinking of), but I'm
not convinced the demand for that behavior is sufficient to justify the
added complexity.

It's still possible to do arbitrarily complex things by using multiple
new-session requests; it's expensive, but that's acceptable if we believe
this to be a minority case.