Executing JS in IE11 using WebDriverJs

We write our e2e tests in JavaScript running on Node.js which allows us to use newer JavaScript/ECMAScript features like template literals.

We have a subset of our e2e tests – mainly signing up as a new customer – which we run a few times a day against Internet Explorer 11: our lowest supported IE version.

I recently added a function that sets a cookie to set the currency for a customer:

setCurrencyForPayments( currency ) {
  const setCookieCode = function( currencyValue ) {
    window.document.cookie = `landingpage_currency=${ currencyValue };domain=.wordpress.com`;
  }
return this.driver.executeScript( setCookieCode, currency );
}

This code works perfectly when executing against Chrome or Firefox, but when it came to executing against IE11 I would see the following (rather unhelpful) error:

Uncaught JavascriptError: JavaScript error (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
Command duration or timeout: 69 milliseconds

I couldn’t work out what was causing this so I decided to take a break. On my break I realised that WebDriverJs is trying to execute a new JavaScript feature (template literals) against an older browser that doesn’t support it! Eureka!

So all I had to do was update our code to:

setCurrencyForPayments( currency ) {
  const setCookieCode = function( currencyValue ) {
    window.document.cookie = 'landingpage_currency=' + currencyValue + ';domain=.wordpress.com';
  }
return this.driver.executeScript( setCookieCode, currency );
}

and all our tests were happy against IE11 again 😊

Having not found a lot about this error or the cause I am hoping this blog post can help someone else out if they encounter this issue also.