RSelenium: RSelenium basics

RSelenium basics

Introduction

The goal of RSelenium is to make it easy to connect to a Selenium Server/ Remote Selenium Server from within R. RSelenium provides R bindings for the Selenium Webdriver API. Selenium is a project focused on automating web browsers. RSelenium allows you to carry out unit testing and regression testing on your webapps and webpages across a range of browser/OS combinations. This allows us to integrate from within R testing and manipulation of popular projects such as shiny, sauceLabs.
This vignette is divided into six main sections:

• Connecting to a Selenium Server.
• Navigating using RSelenium.
• Accessing elements in the DOM.
• Sending events to elements.
• Injecting JavaScript.
• Frames and Windows.

Each section will be an introduction to a major idea in Selenium, and point to more detailed explanation in other vignettes.

Connecting to a Selenium Server.

What is a Selenium Server?

Selenium Server is a standalone java program which allows you to run HTML test suites in a range of different browsers, plus extra options like reporting. You may, or may not, need to run a Selenium Server, depending on how you intend to use Selenium-WebDriver (RSelenium).

Do I need to run a Selenium Server?

If you intend to drive a browser on the same machine that RSelenium is running on then you will need to have Selenium Server running on that machine.

How do I get the Selenium Server stand-alone binary?

RSelenium has a built-in function that will download the stand-alone java binary and place it in the RSelenium package location in the /bin/ directory. If you would like to install elsewhere the function takes a dir argument and can also update an existing binary.

RSelenium::checkForServer()

If you would like to download the binary manually it is currently found here. Look for selenium-server-standalone-x.xx.x.jar in the latest directory.

How do I run the Selenium Server?

There is a utility function included in RSelenium to run an existing stand-alone Selenium Server binary.

RSelenium::startServer()

By default it looks in the RSelenium package /bin/ directory. It has an optional dir argument if your binary is elsewhere. Alternatively you can run the binary manually. Open a console in your OS and navigate to where the binary is located and run:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-x.xx.x.jar

By default the Selenium Server listens for connections on port 4444.

How do I connect to a running server?

RSelenium has a main reference class named remoteDriver. To connect to a server you need to instantiate a new remoteDriver with appropriate options.

# RSelenium::startServer() if required
require(RSelenium)
remDr <- remoteDriver(remoteServerAddr = "localhost" 
                      , port = 4444
                      , browserName = "firefox"
                      )

It would have been sufficient to call remDr <- remoteDriver() but the options where explicitly listed to show how one may connect to an arbitrary ip/port/browser etc. More detail maybe found on the sauceLabs vignette. To connect to the server use the open method.

remDr$open()

RSelenium should now have a connection to the Selenium Server. You can query the status of the remote Server using the status method.

> remDr$getStatus()
$os
              arch               name            version 
           "amd64"            "Linux" "3.8.0-35-generic" 

$java
   version 
"1.6.0_27" 

$build
             revision                  time               version 
            "ff23eac" "2013-12-16 16:11:15"              "2.39.0" 

Navigating using RSelenium.

Basic Navigation

To start with we navigate to a url.

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com")

Then we navigate to a second page.

remDr$navigate("http://www.bbc.co.uk")

> remDr$getCurrentUrl()
[[1]]
[1] "http://www.bbc.co.uk/"

We can go backwards and forwards using the methods goBack and goForward.

remDr$goBack()

> remDr$getCurrentUrl()
[[1]]
[1] "https://www.google.com/"

remDr$goForward()

> remDr$getCurrentUrl()
[[1]]
[1] "http://www.bbc.co.uk/"

To refresh the current page you can use the refresh method.

remDr$refresh()

Accessing elements in the DOM.

The DOM stands for the Document Object Model. It is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Interacting with the DOM will be very important for us with Selenium and the webDriver provides a number of methods in which to do this. A basic html page is

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

The query box on the front page of http://www.google.com has html code input id="gbqfq" class="gbqfif" associated with it. The full html associated with the input tag is:

<input type="text" value="" autocomplete="off" name="q" class="gbqfif" id="gbqfq" style="border: medium none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; height: auto; width: 100%; background: url(&quot;data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAID/AMDAwAAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw%3D%3D&quot;) repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; position: absolute; z-index: 6; left: 0px; outline: medium none;" dir="ltr" spellcheck="false">

Search by id.

To find this element in the DOM a number of methods can be used. We can search by the id.

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'id', value = "gbqfq")

> webElem$getElementAttribute("id")
[[1]]
[1] "gbqfq"

> webElem$getElementAttribute("class")
[[1]]
[1] "gbqfif"

Search by class.

We can also search by class name.

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'class name', "gbqfif")

> webElem$getElementAttribute("class")
[[1]]
[1] "gbqfif"

> webElem$getElementAttribute("type")
[[1]]
[1] "text"

Search using css-selectors

The class is denoted by . when using css selectors. To search on class using css selectors we would use

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'css selector', "input.gbqfif")

and to search on id using css-selectors

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'css selector', "input#gbqfq")

A good example of searching using css-selectors is given here.

Search by name

To search using the name if given of the element. Note that ids are unique in a given html page. Names are not necessarily unique.

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'name', "q")

> webElem$getElementAttribute("name")
[[1]]
[1] "q"

> webElem$getElementAttribute("id")
[[1]]
[1] "gbqfq"

Search using xpath

The final option is to search using xpath. Normally one would use xpath by default when searching.
Xpath using id.

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'xpath', "//*/input[@id = 'gbqfq']")

Xpath using class.

webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = 'xpath', "//*/input[@class = 'gbqfif']")

Sending events to elements.

To illustrate how to interact with elements we will again use the http://www.google.com/ncr as an example.

Sending text to elements

Suppose we would like to search for R cran on google. We would need to find the element for the query box and send the appropriate text to it. We can do this using the sendKeysToElement method for the webElement class.

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = "xpath", "//*/input[@id = 'gbqfq']")
webElem$sendKeysToElement(list("R Cran"))

Sending key presses to elements

We should see that the text R Cran has now been entered into the query box. How do we press enter. We can simply send the enter key to query box. The enter key would be denoted as "\uE007". So we could use:

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = "xpath", "//*/input[@id = 'gbqfq']")
webElem$sendKeysToElement(list("R Cran", "\uE007"))

It is not very easy to remember utf8 codes for appropriate keys so a mapping has been provided in RSelenium. ?selkeys' will bring up a help page explaining the mapping. The utf codes given here have been mapped to easy to remember names.
To use selkeys we would send the following

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = "xpath", "//*/input[@id = 'gbqfq']")
webElem$sendKeysToElement(list("R Cran", key = "enter"))

Typing selKeys into the console will bring up the list of mappings.

Sending mouse events to elements

For this example we will go back to the google frontpage and search for R Cran then we will click the link for the The Comprehensive R Archive Network.

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement(using = "xpath", "//*/input[@id = 'gbqfq']")
webElem$sendKeysToElement(list("R Cran", key = "enter"))

<li class="g"> contains the search results we can find all the search entries on the first page using the findElements method. The header for each link is contained further in with a <h3 class = "r"> tag. We will access the h3 headers first. It will be succinct to find these elements using css selectors.

webElems <- remDr$findElements(using = 'css selector', "li.g h3.r")
resHeaders <- unlist(lapply(webElems, function(x){x$getElementText()}))
> resHeaders
 [1] "The Comprehensive R Archive Network"                        
 [2] "Comprehensive R Archive"                                    
 [3] "Mirrors"                                                    
 [4] "Contributed Packages"                                       
 [5] "R for Mac OS X"                                             
 [6] "Download R 3.0.2"                                           
 [7] "CRAN Repository Policy"                                     
 [8] "The R Project for Statistical Computing"                    
 [9] "Cran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"                    
[10] "Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) - StatLib - Carnegie"
[11] "CRAN - Package R.methodsS3"                                 
[12] "CRAN - Package R.cache"                                     
[13] "Ubuntu – Details of package r-cran-sp in lucid"

We can see that the first link is the one we want but in case googles search results change we refer to it as

webElem <- webElems[[which(resHeaders == "The Comprehensive R Archive Network")]]

How do we click the link. We can use the clickElement method:

webElem$clickElement()

> remDr$getCurrentUrl()
[[1]]
[1] "http://cran.r-project.org/"

> remDr$getTitle()
[[1]]
[1] "The Comprehensive R Archive Network"

Injecting JavaScript

Sometimes it is necessary to interact with the current url using JavaScript. This maybe necessary to call bespoke methods or to have more control over the page for example by adding the JQuery library to the page if it is missing. Selenium has two methods we can use to execute JavaScript namely executeScript and executeAsyncScript from the remoteDriver class. We return to the google front page to investigate these methods.

Injecting JavaScript synchronously

Returning to the google homepage we can find the element for the google image. The image has id = "hplogo" and we can use this in an xpath or search by id etc to select the element. In this case we use css selectors:

remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
webElem <- remDr$findElement("css selector", "img#hplogo")

Is the image visible? Clearly it is but we can check using javascript.

> remDr$executeScript("return document.getElementById('hplogo').hidden;", args = list())
[[1]]
[1] FALSE

Great so the image is not hidden indicated by the FALSE. We can hide it executing some simple JavaScript.

remDr$executeScript("document.getElementById('hplogo').hidden = true;", args = list())

> remDr$executeScript("return document.getElementById('hplogo').hidden;", args = list())
[[1]]
[1] TRUE

So now the image is hidden. We used an element here given by id = "hplogo". We had to use the JavaScript function getElementById to access it. It would be nicer if we could have used webElem which we had specified earlier. If we pass a webElement object as an argument to either executeScript or executeAsyncScript RSelenium will pass it in an appropriate fashion.

> remDr$executeScript(script = "return arguments[0].hidden = false;", args = list(webElem))
[[1]]
[1] FALSE

Notive how we passed the web element to the method executeScript. The script argument defines the script to execute in the form of a function body. The value returned by that function will be returned to the client. The function will be invoked with the provided args. If the function returns an element then this will be returned as an object of class webElement:

test <- remDr$executeScript("return document.getElementById('gbqfq');", args = list())

> test[[1]]
[1] "remoteDriver fields"
$remoteServerAddr
[1] "localhost"

$port
[1] 4444

$browserName
[1] "firefox"

$version
[1] ""

$platform
[1] "ANY"

$javascript
[1] TRUE

$autoClose
[1] FALSE

$nativeEvents
[1] TRUE

$extraCapabilities
list()

[1] "webElement fields"
$elementId
[1] 1

> class(test[[1]])
[1] "webElement"
attr(,"package")
[1] "RSelenium"

Injecting JavaScript asynchronously

I will briefly touch on asynch versus sync calls here. With the current firefox and selenium server combination (firefox 26.0 sel server 2.39.0) I had issues with async javascript calls when nativeEvents = TRUE (the default) was used.
For the example below I switched to nativeEvents = FALSE

remDr <- remoteDriver(nativeEvents = FALSE)
remDr$open()
remDr$navigate("http://www.google.com/ncr")
remDr$setAsyncScriptTimeout(10000)

Observe:

remDr$executeAsyncScript("setTimeout(function(){ alert('Hello'); arguments[arguments.length -1]('DONE');},5000); ", args = list())

versus

remDr$executeScript("setTimeout(function(){ alert('Hello');},5000); return 'DONE';", args = list())

The async version waits until the callback (defined as the last argument) is called.

Frames and Windows.

In the context of a web browser, a frame is a part of a web page or browser window which displays content independent of its container, with the ability to load content independently.

Frames in Selenium

We will demonstrate interacting with frames by way of example. The R project conviently contains frames so we shall use RSelenium to interact with it. Assume we have a remoteDriver opened.

remDr$navigate("http://www.r-project.org/")

> htmlParse(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>The R Project for Statistical Computing</title>
<link type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" rel="icon">
<link type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon">
<link href="R.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<frameset border="0" cols="1*, 4*">
<frameset rows="120, 1*">
<frame frameborder="0" name="logo" src="logo.html">
<frame frameborder="0" name="contents" src="navbar.html">
</frameset>
<frame frameborder="0" name="banner" src="main.shtml">
<noframes>
&lt;h1&gt;The R Project for Statistical Computing&lt;/h1&gt;

Your browser seems not to support frames,
here is the &lt;A href="navbar.html"&gt;contents page&lt;/A&gt; of the R Project's
website.
</noframes>
</frameset>
</html>

We can see the content is contained in three frames and we dont appear to have access to the content within a frame. Put in the browser we see all the content:

remDr$maxWindowSize()
remDr$screenshot(display = TRUE)

RProject front page

To access the content we have to switch to a frame using the switchToFrame method of the remoteDriver class.

webElems <- remDr$findElements(using = "tag name", "frame")
# webElems <- remDr$findElements("//frame") # using xpath

> sapply(webElems, function(x){x$getElementAttribute("src")})
[[1]]
[1] "http://www.r-project.org/logo.html"

[[2]]
[1] "http://www.r-project.org/navbar.html"

[[3]]
[1] "http://www.r-project.org/main.shtml"

remDr$switchToFrame(webElems[[2]])  

> htmlParse(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>R Contents</title>
<link href="R.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>

<em class="navigation">About R</em><br><a target="banner" href="about.html">What is R?</a><br><a target="banner" href="contributors.html">Contributors</a><br><a target="banner" href="screenshots/screenshots.html">Screenshots</a><br><a target="banner" href="news.html">What's new?</a><br><p>
<em class="navigation">Download, Packages</em><br><a target="banner" href="http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html">CRAN</a>

</p>
<p>
<em class="navigation">R Project</em><br><a target="banner" href="foundation/main.html">Foundation</a><br><a target="banner" href="foundation/memberlist.html">Members &amp; Donors</a><br><a target="banner" href="mail.html">Mailing Lists</a><br><a target="_top" href="http://bugs.R-project.org">Bug Tracking</a><br><a target="_top" href="http://developer.R-project.org">Developer Page</a><br><a target="banner" href="conferences.html">Conferences</a><br><a target="banner" href="search.html">Search</a><br></p>
<p>
<em class="navigation">Documentation</em><br><a target="banner" href="http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html">Manuals</a><br><a target="banner" href="http://cran.r-project.org/faqs.html">FAQs</a><br><a target="_top" href="http://journal.r-project.org">The R Journal</a><br><!--
<a href="doc/Rnews/index.html" target="banner">Newsletter</a><br>
--><a target="_top" href="http://wiki.r-project.org">Wiki</a><br><a target="banner" href="doc/bib/R-books.html">Books</a><br><a target="banner" href="certification.html">Certification</a><br><a target="banner" href="other-docs.html">Other</a><br></p>
<p>
<em class="navigation">Misc</em><br><a target="_top" href="http://www.bioconductor.org">Bioconductor</a><br><a target="banner" href="other-projects.html">Related Projects</a><br><a target="_top" href="http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=rugs:r_user_groups">User Groups</a><br><a target="banner" href="links.html">Links</a><br></p>
</body>
</html>

Now we see the source code of the navigation sidePanel. Notice how we used a webElement in the method switchToFrame. To further demonstrate we are now “in” this frame lets get all the href attributes:

webElems <- remDr$findElements("css selector", "[href]")
sapply(webElems, function(x){x$getElementAttributes("href")})

> unlist(sapply(webElems, function(x){x$getElementAttribute("href")}))
 [1] "http://www.r-project.org/R.css"                          
 [2] "http://www.r-project.org/about.html"                     
 [3] "http://www.r-project.org/contributors.html"              
 [4] "http://www.r-project.org/screenshots/screenshots.html"   
 [5] "http://www.r-project.org/news.html"                      
 [6] "http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html"                  
 [7] "http://www.r-project.org/foundation/main.html"           
 [8] "http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html"     
 [9] "http://www.r-project.org/mail.html"                      
[10] "http://bugs.r-project.org/"                              
[11] "http://developer.r-project.org/"                         
[12] "http://www.r-project.org/conferences.html"               
[13] "http://www.r-project.org/search.html"                    
[14] "http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html"                  
[15] "http://cran.r-project.org/faqs.html"                     
[16] "http://journal.r-project.org/"                           
[17] "http://wiki.r-project.org/"                              
[18] "http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html"           
[19] "http://www.r-project.org/certification.html"             
[20] "http://www.r-project.org/other-docs.html"                
[21] "http://www.bioconductor.org/"                            
[22] "http://www.r-project.org/other-projects.html"            
[23] "http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=rugs:r_user_groups"
[24] "http://www.r-project.org/links.html" 

Notice if we pass a NULL value to the method switchToFrame we move back to the default view.

remDr$switchToFrame(NULL)

> htmlParse(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>The R Project for Statistical Computing</title>
<link type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" rel="icon">
<link type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon">
<link href="R.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<frameset border="0" cols="1*, 4*">
<frameset rows="120, 1*">
<frame frameborder="0" name="logo" src="logo.html">
<frame frameborder="0" name="contents" src="navbar.html">
</frameset>
<frame frameborder="0" name="banner" src="main.shtml">
<noframes>
&lt;h1&gt;The R Project for Statistical Computing&lt;/h1&gt;

Your browser seems not to support frames,
here is the &lt;A href="navbar.html"&gt;contents page&lt;/A&gt; of the R Project's
website.
</noframes>
</frameset>
</html>

Finally we can switch to the main panel using a name

remDr$switchToFrame("banner")

> htmlParse(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>The R Project for Statistical Computing</title>
<link href="R.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>

<h1 align="left">The R Project for Statistical Computing</h1>

<p>
</p>
<center>
<a href="misc/acpclust.R"><img border="0" alt="R Graphics Demo" src="hpgraphic.png"></a>
</center>

<p>
</p>
<table width="100%" border="1"><tbody>
<tr><td>
    <h2>Getting Started:</h2>
    <ul>
<li>R is a free software environment for statistical
      computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety
      of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. To <strong><a href="http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html">download R</a></strong>, please
      choose your preferred <a href="http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html">CRAN mirror</a>.
      </li>
      <li>
      If you have questions about R like how to download and install
      the software, or what the license terms are,
      please read our <a href="http://cran.R-project.org/faqs.html">answers to frequently asked questions</a> before you send an email.
      </li>
    <p>
  </p>
</ul>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
    <h2>News:</h2>

    <ul>
<li>
<strong>R version 3.0.2</strong> (Frisbee Sailing) has been
      released on 2013-09-25.</li>

      <li>
      <strong><a href="http://www.r-project.org/useR-2013" target="_top">
      useR! 2013</a></strong>, 
      took place at the University of Castilla-La Mancha,
      Albacete, Spain, July 10-12 2013.



      </li>
<li>
  <a target="_top" href="http://journal.r-project.org/current.html">
      <strong>The R Journal Vol.5/1</strong></a>
    is available.
      </li>


      <li>
<strong>R version 2.15.3</strong> (Security Blanket) has been
      released on 2013-03-01.</li>




<!-- Dead stuff, for later reuse:

            <li>
      <strong><a href="http://cran.R-project.org/src/base-prerelease">
      R 3.0.2 (Frisbee Sailing) prerelease versions</a></strong> will
      appear starting 
      September 15.
      Final release is scheduled for September 25, 2013.<br>
      Thanks to Erin Hodgess for the idea leading to the name.
      </li>

      <li>
      <strong><a href="http://cran.R-project.org/src/base-prerelease">
      R 3.0.1 prerelease versions</a></strong> will appear starting
      May 6.
      Final release is scheduled for May 16, 2013.<br>
      </li>

      <li>
      The R Foundation as been awarded <a
      href="soc11/index.html">
      fifteen slots for R projects</a> in the <a
      href="http://code.google.com/soc/" target="_top">Google Summer of Code 2011</a>.

     <li>
      <strong><a target="_top"
      href="http://www.r-project.org/dsc-2009"> DSC 2009</a></strong>,
      The 6th workshop on Directions in Statistical Computing, has been
      held at the Center for Health and Society, University of
      Copenhagen, Denmark, July 13-14, 2009. </li>


      <li>
      <strong><a target="_top" href="http://www.agrocampus-rennes.fr/math/useR-2009/">
      useR! 2009</a></strong>, the R user conference,
      has been be held at Agrocampus Rennes, France, July 8-10, 2009.

      <li>
      The R Foundation as been awarded <a
      href="soc09/index.html">
      four slots for R projects</a> in the <a
      href="http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/rf" target="_top">Google Summer of Code 2009</a>.


      <li>We have started to collect ideas for the <a
      href="http://www.r-project.org/soc09">Google Summer of Code 2009</a>.

      </li>
-->


    </ul>
<p>
  </p>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>

  This server is hosted by the <a target="_top" href="http://statmath.wu.ac.at">Institute for Statistics and Mathematics</a> of <a target="_top" href="http://www.wu.ac.at">WU (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien)</a>.





</p>
</body>
</html>

Windows in Selenium

The easiest way to illustrate Windows in RSelenium is again by way of example. We will use the R project website. First we select the download R element in the main frame.

remDr$navigate("http://www.r-project.org")
remDr$switchToFrame("banner")
webElem <- remDr$findElement("partial link text", "download R")

> webElem$getElementText()
[[1]]
[1] "download R"

We now send a selection of key presses to this element to open the link it points to in a new window. If you did it manually you would move the mouse to the element right click on the link press the down arrow key twice then press enter. We will do the same

loc <- webElem$getElementLocation()

> loc[c('x','y')]
$x
[1] 347

$y
[1] 519

remDr$mouseMoveToLocation(webElement = webElem) # move mouse to the element we selected
remDr$click(2) # 2 indicates click the right mouse button
remDr$sendKeysToActiveElement(list(key = 'down_arrow', key = 'down_arrow', key = 'enter'))

Notice now that a new windows has opened on the remote browser.

> remDr$getCurrentWindowHandle()
[[1]]
[1] "{573d17e5-b95a-41b9-a65f-04092b6a804b}"

> remDr$getWindowHandles()
[[1]]
[1] "{573d17e5-b95a-41b9-a65f-04092b6a804b}" "{3336c9b3-4c46-4a95-853e-2786a529ba29}"

> remDr$getTitle()
[[1]]
[1] "The R Project for Statistical Computing"

> 
> remDr$switchToWindow("{3336c9b3-4c46-4a95-853e-2786a529ba29}")
> remDr$getTitle()
[[1]]
[1] "CRAN - Mirrors"

So using the code above one can observe how to switch between different windows on the remote browser.