Selenium tests on a Windows 8.1 machine with Internet Explorer 11

Today I tried to add an Windows 8.1 machine to my Selenium Grid and ran into some strange problems. I installed a new Windows 8.1 (32 bit) machine as a selenium node for my selenium grid. After the installation of Windows 8.1 was completed, I configured all browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) and the necessary Webdrivers on the machine. Then I connected the machine to the Selenium grid and started some tests. everything seemed to run fine until I started the tests on Internet Explorer 11.

When running the tests, the browser window opened the requested URL as expected but then nothing more happened. The window did'nt even close after the test, so there must be something wrong. In the Selenium log on the machine I could see, that selenium was unable to find an element, which definitely was present on the website. After some debugging and search in the internet I found out, that Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 by default has some security settings, which must be disabled in case to run Selenium tests on the machine.

• Disable the Protection Mode for all zones
• Disable "Enhanced Protection Mode"

After I disabled both settings (directly in the "Internet Options") the tests were executed as expected.

Also make sure to use 32 bit versions of both the Internet Explorer driver and the operating system. I tried to get things running with the 64 bit version of Windows 8.1, but the test execution on Internet Explorer was extremely slow (it took about 4 seconds to type a character), so I ended up using the 32 bit version of Windows 8.1.