Capturing pop-up windows with Web Test Recorder in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)

** As always, use this at your own peril. This post is entirely based on my experience – your mileage may vary! **

I was working with a customer who were having trouble recording a web test using the Web Test Recorder in Visual Studio Team Suite Test Edition. As they clicked through the site that they were testing, one of the links opened a new window to display some data. The web test recorder was capturing interactions through the original window, but nothing was being captured from the newly opened window. As is normal for problems with the web test recorder, we went through the steps in Mike Taute’s troublshooting guide but still weren’t able to resolve the issue.

Based on a helpful reply from an internal discussion list, it would seem that the problem is related to the way IE8 uses processes for isolation. Fortunately, I found a post on the AskIE blog that seems promising: Opening a New Tab may launch a New Process with Internet Explorer 8.0. When we tried setting the TabProcGrowth value to 0 and restarting Internet Explorer stopped creating new processes when the new window was created and the web test recorder captured the full output. If you’re considering trying this change then I strongly recommend reading the AskIE post to find out more about the implications of making this change.